The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) covertly infiltrated the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests in Portland and continued their surveillance months after the unrest.
Agents of the FBI stood “shoulder to shoulder” with activists, videotaping the demonstration and leading the local police towards potential arrests, according to a New York Times report.
Agents began to monitor protests groups in the summer of 2020 during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations
Surveillance was stepped up after rioters attacked the Matthew O. Hatfield courthouse in Portland
A federal law enforcement agent was attacked with a hammer during that uprising
Agents continued to observe the protest movement during a raucous demonstration of President Biden’s inaugeration
Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were dressed in plainclothes and embedded in Portland racial justice protests that followed the presidential inauguration, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
The newspaper’s investigation found that the FBI had officers in the protests walking alongside activists, recording the scenes of the day and alerting local police to potential arrests.
Exclusive: Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal details of how police posed as protesters amid unrest following the death of Eric Garner
People protest after a grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case.
Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.
The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.
The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.
Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers’ group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists’ phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.
protesters text message
Police obtained access to protesters’ text messages, the documents show. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
“That text loop was definitely just for organizers, I don’t know how that got out,” said Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer. “Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.”
Keegan Stephan, a regular attendee of the Grand Central protests in 2014 and 2015, said information about protesters’ whereabouts was limited to a small group of core organizers at that time. “I feel like the undercover was somebody who was or is very much a part of the group, and has access to information we only give to people we trust,” said Stephan, who has been assisting attorneys with a lawsuit to obtain the documents on behalf of plaintiff James Logue, a protester. “If you’re walking to Grand Central with a handful of people for an action, that’s much more than just showing up to a public demonstration – that sounds like a level of friendship.”
Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College, agreed that it would not be easy for an undercover officer to join a small group of protesters and hear their plans. “It would be pretty amazing that they would be able to get into the core group in such a short window of time,” said Giacalone. “This could have been going on a while before for these people to get so close to the inner circle.”
The NYPD documents also included a handful of pictures and one short video taken at Grand Central Station demonstrations. Most are pictures of crowds milling about or taking part in demonstrations. In one picture of a small group of activists, the NYPD identifies an individual in a brown jacket as the “main protester”. These images of protesters are reminiscent of those taken by undercover transit police, who were also deployed to Black Lives Matter protests in Grand Central Station in 2015.
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An individual is identified as the ‘main protester’. Photograph: NYPD/Screenshot/Scribd
Giacalone said this type of leadership identification was standard police practice at protests. “If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers,” he said. “Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so.”
Attorneys say the documents raise legal questions about whether the NYPD was acting in compliance with the department’s intelligence-gathering rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines. The guidelines, which are based on an ongoing decades-old class-action lawsuit, hold that the NYPD can begin formally investigating first amendment activity “when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed” and if the police surveillance plan has been authorized by a committee known as the Handschu Authority. (That committee was exclusively staffed by NYPD officials at the time.) However, according to the guidelines, before launching a formal investigation, the NYPD can also conduct investigative work such as “checking of leads” and “preliminary inquiries” with even lower standards of suspicion.
Michael Price, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was difficult to know whether NYPD’s undercover surveillance operations crossed the line, as the documents did not make clear what, if any, stage of investigation the police were in at the time of the operations. But he said the department’s retention of pictures and video raised questions, since police are not allowed to retain information about public events unless it relates to unlawful activity.
“So my question would be: what was the unlawful activity that police had reason to suspect here?” said Price. “It doesn’t appear that there was any criminal behavior they were talking about in the emails. Most references are to protesters being peaceful, so I would be very concerned if they were hinging their whole investigation on civil disobedience, such as unpermitted protests or blocking of pedestrians.”
Throughout the emails, the NYPD’s undercover sources provide little indication of any unlawful activity, frequently characterizing demonstrators as peaceful and orderly with only one mention of a single arrest.
“The documents uniformly show no crime occurring, but NYPD had undercovers inside the protests for months on end as if they were al-Qaida,” said David Thompson, an attorney of Stecklow & Thompson, who helped sue for the records.
Giacalone argued that police could have easily come up with a legal justification to initiate surveillance, especially if such operations occurred after the shooting of two NYPD officers in December of 2014 (all dates in the NYPD’s email communications were redacted). But he noted that such investigative activities would be harder to justify if officers were not directly observing signs of unlawful activity.
“If they’re not talking about any crimes being committed, they’re going to have a difficult time defending this. It may end up in another one of these lawsuits,” said Giacalone. “Some may say this is good police work, fine, but good police work or not, we have rules against this kind of thing in New York.”
Attorneys have already filed a petition charging that the NYPD may have failed to produce all of its surveillance records. But for some protesters, the damage has already been done.
“In the first couple of months, we had a lot of people in and out of the group, some because they didn’t fit our style but others because of the whispers that they were undercovers,” recalled Waithe. “Whether it was real or perceived, that was the most debilitating part for me, the whispers … It’s really hard to organize when you can’t trust each other.”
George Joseph in New York
Tuesday 4 April 2017 11.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 4 April 2017 22.00 BST
Find this story at 4 April 2017
© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited
Exclusive: Watchdog investigates claim that secretive unit worked with Indian police to obtain campaigners’ passwords
An anonymous letter claimed the Scotland Yard unit accessed activists’ email accounts for ‘a number of years’.
The police watchdog is investigating allegations that a secretive Scotland Yard unit used hackers to illegally access the private emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists.
The allegations were made by an anonymous individual who says the unit worked with Indian police, who in turn used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords of the email accounts of the campaigners, and some reporters and press photographers.
Met presses undercover police inquiry to examine fewer officers
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The person, who says he or she previously worked for the intelligence unit that monitors the activities of political campaigners, detailed their concerns in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones. The peer passed on the allegations to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which is investigating.
Hacked passwords were passed to the Metropolitan police unit, according to the writer of the letter, which then regularly checked the emails of the campaigners and the media to gather information. The letter to Jones listed the passwords of environmental campaigners, four of whom were from Greenpeace. Several confirmed they matched the ones they had used to open their emails.
The letter said: “For a number of years the unit had been illegally accessing the email accounts of activists. This has largely been accomplished because of the contact that one of the officers had developed with counterparts in India who in turn were using hackers to obtain email passwords.”
Jones said: “There is more than enough to justify a full-scale criminal investigation into the activities of these police officers and referral to a public inquiry. I have urged the Independent Police Complaints Commission to act quickly to secure further evidence and to find out how many people were victims of this nasty practice.”
The letter also alleges that emails of reporters and photographers, including two working for the Guardian, were monitored. A spokesperson for the Guardian said: “Allegations that the Metropolitan police has accessed the email accounts of Guardian journalists are extremely concerning and we expect a full and thorough investigation into these claims.”
The IPCC has for several months been investigating claims that the national domestic extremism and disorder intelligence unit shredded a large number of documents over a number of days in May 2014.
The stories you need to read, in one handy email
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Last month the IPCC said it had uncovered evidence suggesting the documents had been destroyed despite a specific instruction that files should be preserved to be examined by a judge-led public inquiry into the undercover policing of political groups.
The letter claimed that the shredding “has been happening for some time and on a far greater scale than the IPCC seems to be aware of”. The author added that “the main reason for destroying these documents is that they reveal that [police] officers were engaged in illegal activities to obtain intelligence on protest groups”.
The letter to Jones lists 10 individuals, alongside specific passwords that they used to access their email accounts. Lawyers at Bindmans, who are representing Jones, contacted six on the list and, after outlining the allegations, asked them to volunteer their passwords.
Five of them gave the identical password that had been identified in the letter. The sixth gave a password that was almost the same. The remaining four on the list have yet to be approached or cannot be traced.
Colin Newman has for two decades volunteered to help organise mainly local Greenpeace protests which he says were publicised to the media. He used the password specified in the letter for his private email account between the late 1990s and last year.
Newman said he felt “angry and violated, especially for the recipients”. He added: “I am open about my actions as I make a stand and am personally responsible for those, but it is not fair and just that others are scrutinised.
“I am no threat. There is no justification for snooping in private accounts unless you have a reason to do so, and you have the authority to do that.”
He said he had been cautioned by the police once, for trespassing on the railway during a protest against coal about two years ago.
Another on the list was Cat Dorey who has worked for Greenpeace, both as an employee and a volunteer, since 2001. She said all the protests she had been involved in were non-violent.
The password specified in the letter sent to Jones had been used for emails that contained private information about her family and friends.
She said: “Even though Greenpeace UK staff, volunteers, and activists were always warned to assume someone was listening to our phone conversations or reading our emails, it still came as a shock to find out I was being watched by the police. It’s creepy to think of strangers reading my personal emails.”
In 2005, she was part of a group of Greenpeace protesters who were sentenced to 80 hours of community service after installing solar panels on the home of the then deputy prime minister, John Prescott, in a climate change demonstration.
According to the letter, the “most sensitive side of the work was monitoring the email accounts of radical journalists who reported on activist protests (as well as sympathetic photographers) including at least two employed by the Guardian newspaper”. None were named.
Investigators working for the IPCC have met Jones twice with her lawyer, Jules Carey, and have asked to interview the peer. An IPCC spokesperson said: “After requesting and receiving a referral by the Metropolitan police service, we have begun an independent investigation related to anonymous allegations concerning the accessing of personal data. We are still assessing the scope of the investigation and so we are not able to comment further.”
The letter’s writer said he or she had spoken out about the “serious abuse of power” because “over the years, the unit had evolved into an organisation that had little respect for the law, no regard for personal privacy, encouraged highly immoral activity and, I believe, is a disgrace”.
In recent years, the unit has monitored thousands of political activists, drawing on information gathered by undercover officers and informants as well as from open sources such as websites. Police chiefs say they need to keep track of a wide pool of activists to identify the small number who commit serious crime to promote their cause.
But the unit has come in for criticism after it was revealed to be compiling files on law-abiding campaigners, including John Catt, a 91-year-old pensioner with no criminal record as well as senior members of the Green party including the MP Caroline Lucas.
The Metropolitan police said the IPCC had made it “aware of anonymous allegations concerning the accessing of personal data, and requested the matters were referred to them by the MPS. This was done. The MPS is now aware that the IPCC are carrying out an independent investigation.”
Rob Evans
Tuesday 21 March 2017 16.35 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 22 March 2017 00.50 GMT
Find this story at 22 March 2017
© 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited
New investigation reveals agency’s actions amounted to ‘substantial non-compliance’ with its own rules
The FBI violated its internal rules while spying on Tar Sands Blockade activists in Texas protesting the Keystone XL pipeline, a new report shows. (Photo: Tar Sands Blockade/flickr/cc)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) broke its own internal rules when it spied on Keystone XL opponents in Texas, violating guidelines designed to prevent the agency from becoming overly involved in complex political issues, a new report by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal published Tuesday has revealed.
Internal documents acquired by the outlets through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show how the FBI failed to get approval for launching investigations into Houston-based protesters, whom the agency labeled “environmental extremists,” and held a bias in favor of the controversial tar sands pipeline—currently awaiting federal approval—extolling its supposed economic benefits in one document which outlined reasons for spying on its opponents.
“Many of these extremists believe the debates over pollution, protection of wildlife, safety, and property rights have been overshadowed by the promise of jobs and cheaper oil prices,” the file states. “The Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States.”
The Guardian reports:
Between November 2012 and June 2014, the documents show, the FBI collated inside knowledge about forthcoming protests, documented the identities of individuals photographing oil-related infrastructure, scrutinised police intelligence and cultivated at least one informant.
….However, the partially redacted documents reveal the investigation into anti-Keystone activists occurred without prior approval of the top lawyer and senior agent in the Houston field office, a stipulation laid down in rules provided by the attorney general.
Additionally, the FBI appeared to have opened its file on the Keystone XL opponents in 2013 following a meeting between officials from the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.
“For a period of time—possibly as long as eight months—agents acting beyond their authority were monitoring activists aligned with [direct action climate group] Tar Sands Blockade,” the Guardian writes.
Dozens of activists were arrested in Texas in late 2012, although none were accused of violent crime or property damage, according to key Tar Sands Blockade organizer, Ron Seifert.
“Less than a month after TransCanada showed the FBI a PowerPoint claiming that people opposed to [Keystone XL] need to be watched, Houston’s FBI office cuts corners to start an investigation; it’s not surprising but it is revealing of who they really work for,” Seifert told Common Dreams on Monday. “The FBI has been harassing and actively repressing communities of organizers for decades.”
Yet more records show that the FBI associated the Tar Sands Blockade, which organizes peaceful protests, with other “domestic terrorism issues.”
Other documents suggest that the Houston-based investigation was only one of a larger probe, possibly monitoring other anti-Keystone XL activists around the country.
“We’re not surprised,” Seifert continued. “We’re also not deterred. Movements for climate and environmental justice are activating people from diverse political backgrounds to take direct action to defend themselves from threats like [Keystone XL]. People are stepping out of the blind alleys of electoral politics and building grassroots power, and that’s scary for people who want a monopoly on power.”
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
byCommon Dreams
byNadia Prupis, staff writer
Find this story at 12 May 2015
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
A new report confirms for the first time that the FBI spied on activists in Texas who tried to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Documents from the FBI reveal it failed to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened its investigation, which was run from its Houston field office. The files document “substantial non-compliance” with Department of Justice rules. The Tar Sands Blockade mentioned in that report was one of the main groups targeted by the FBI. Agents in Houston office also told TransCanada they would share “pertinent intelligence regarding any threats” to the company in advance of protests. We are joined by Adam Federman, contributing editor to Earth Island Journal and co-author of the new investigation published by The Guardian, “Revealed: FBI violated its own rules while spying on Keystone XL opponents.” In February, he also revealed how the FBI has recently pursued environmental activists in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington and Idaho for “little more than taking photographs of oil and gas industry installations.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A new report confirms for the first time that the FBI spied on activists in Texas who tried to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The report is based on FBI documents obtained by The Guardian and the Earth Island Journal. The documents also reveal that the FBI failed to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened its investigation, which was run from its Houston field office. The files document, quote, “substantial non-compliance” with Department of Justice rules. Much of the FBI’s surveillance took place between November of 2012 and June 2014.
AMY GOODMAN: The Tar Sands Blockade mentioned in the report was one of the main groups targeted by the FBI. Agents in Houston also told TransCanada they would share, quote, “pertinent intelligence regarding any threats” to the company in advance of protests.
For more, we are joined by Adam Federman, contributing editor to Earth Island Journal, co-author of this new investigation that was published by The Guardian. It’s headlined “Revealed: FBI Violated Its Own Rules While Spying on Keystone XL Opponents.” In February, he also revealed how the FBI has recently pursued environmental activists in Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Washington and Idaho for, quote, “little more than taking photographs of oil and gas industry installations.”
Adam Federman, thank you so much for joining us from Burlington, Vermont. Talk about this most recent exposé. How do you know the FBI was spying on those who are opposed to the Keystone XL?
ADAM FEDERMAN: Yeah, the recent investigation is based on more than 80 pages of documents that we obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. And the most striking thing about them is that they demonstrated for the first time that the FBI opened an investigation into anti-Keystone pipeline campaigners in Texas in 2012, late 2012, and that investigation continued through 2013, despite the fact that it was opened without proper approval from within the FBI. And what’s interesting about them is that they show extensive interest in Tar Sands Blockade and activists organizing in Houston, particularly in, yeah, neighborhoods in East Houston, where tar sands oil would eventually end up at the refineries that are based there.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of the most surprising revelations that you found in these documents, could you talk about that?
ADAM FEDERMAN: Yeah, there are several. I mean, the fact that the investigation was opened without proper approval is probably most noteworthy. The FBI requires approval from legal counsel and a senior agent for investigations that are described as sensitive, and those include investigations into political or religious organizations, media institutions, academic institutions, and basically they set a higher threshold for opening an investigation. So, the fact that the Houston domain failed to do that obviously violates agency protocol.
But I think, more broadly, the documents also sort of illuminate the FBI’s characterization of environmental organizations and activism in the country. You know, the sort of opening salvo in the investigation is a synopsis of what they call environmental extremism, and that sort of undergirds the entire investigation and has also—you know, we’ve seen the same sort of language used in other contexts, not just surrounding Keystone pipeline.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam, many of the—looking at the quotes in the FBI documents, they talk about, as you said, the environmental extremists and say, quote, “Many of these extremists believe the debates over pollution, protection of wildlife, safety, and property rights have been overshadowed by the promise of jobs and cheaper oil prices. The Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States.” Can you explain these documents?
ADAM FEDERMAN: Yeah, I mean, that quote is really quite amazing for a number of reasons. Mike German, a former FBI agent who’s now at the Brennan Center and who we worked with on this story, you know, said that that characterization would include just about anyone who watches the evening news. I mean, it’s such a broad brush to tar—to describe environmental activists as extremists simply for being concerned about things like pollution, wildlife and property rights.
And then the FBI also goes on to claim that the Keystone pipeline is vital to the national security and economy of the United States, which of course is highly controversial and contested. And as I’m sure your viewers know, the State Department is still deliberating over whether to approve the northern leg of the pipeline itself. So that question remains open; however, it seems that the FBI has taken it upon its own to suggest that the pipeline is crucial to U.S. national security and financial security.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the 2010 intelligence bulletin from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit that you obtained. It warned that, even though the industry had encountered only low-level vandalism and trespassing, recent “criminal incidents” suggested environmental extremism was on the rise. The FBI concluded, quote, “Environmental extremism will become a greater threat to the energy industry owing to our historical understanding that some environmental extremists have progressed from committing low-level crimes against targets to more significant crimes over time in an effort to further the environmental extremism cause.”
ADAM FEDERMAN: Yeah, it’s a fascinating document. And the story behind how I obtained it is because of the fact that that very document was used by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security to justify surveillance of anti-fracking groups in the state. And it essentially captures the FBI’s thinking on, you know, the threat of environmental extremism to—specifically to the energy industry. And this is laid out, as you say, in 2010, so I think that this is sort of the foundation for the FBI’s approach to the environmental movement more broadly. And I think, with these more recent documents, we’re seeing that sort of carried out in real time. And we also know that the FBI has had high-level meetings with TransCanada and that local and state law enforcement along the pipeline route and in Pennsylvania and elsewhere has actively investigated and spied on environmental activists of, you know, all stripes. And it’s quite systematic, and I do think that the FBI is in many ways leading the charge.
AMY GOODMAN: You report the FBI’s monitoring of Tar Sands Blockade activists failed to follow proper protocols for more than eight months. I want to read the FBI’s response: quote, “While the FBI approval levels required by internal policy were not initially obtained, once discovered, corrective action was taken, non-compliance was remedied, and the oversight was properly reported through the FBI’s internal oversight mechanism.” That’s what the FBI said, acknowledging they didn’t initially get approval. Adam, as we wrap up right now, if you can talk about what—the legality of what the FBI did, in what you released today in the Earth Island Journal and The Guardian, and also in your past reporting on FBI spying on activists?
ADAM FEDERMAN: Well, I think, unfortunately, it’s perhaps not the exception that the FBI has opened an investigation without proper approval. In 2011, the inspector general issued a report showing widespread cheating on a test that was designed to prevent this very kind of thing from happening. So it essentially demonstrates a lack of internal control. But more broadly speaking, the question that I think we need to be asking is whether the investigation, opened properly or not, should have been conducted to begin with. I mean, Tar Sands Blockade is committed to nonviolent civil disobedience. They’ve been very open and transparent about their activism and work. And I think the question is whether this investigation should have been opened to begin with, and, quite frankly, if the FBI is actively investigating other anti-Keystone pipeline activists or anti-fracking activists in other states.
AMY GOODMAN: Adam Federman, we want to thank you for being with us, contributing editor to Earth Island Journal, where he covers the intersection between law enforcement and the environment. He co-authored the new investigation published by The Guardian, “Revealed: FBI Violated Its Own Rules While Spying on Keystone XL Opponents.” We’ll link to that story at democracynow.org. When we come back, it’s the 30th anniversary of the MOVE bombing, when the Philadelphia police bombed a neighborhood. Stay with us.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2015
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More than 18 months after federal investigation violated internal rules, activists say they were still watchlisted at the airport, visited at home by a terrorism task force and detained for hours because they ‘seemed like protesters’
An activist was placed on a US government watchlist for domestic flights after being swept up in an FBI investigation into protests of the Keystone XL pipeline, linking a breach of intelligence protocol with accounts of continued tracking that environmentalists fear could follow them for life.
Revealed: FBI violated its own rules while spying on Keystone XL opponents
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Twenty-five-year-old Bradley Stroot is one of several campaigners to go public, after the Guardian revealed an FBI investigation that labeled them “environmental extremists”, with new allegations of a continued crackdown. From an hours-long detention at the US border to a home visit by a terrorism task force and an encounter with police searching for bombs, the activists say law enforcement has tracked them from a peaceful Texas protest of the highly contentious oil project in 2012 and 2013 to the tony suburbs of Indianapolis as recently as the end of last year.
Stroot told the Guardian that when he flew back to Texas to visit a friend last December, he learned that he was on a watchlist – known as a “Secondary Security Screening Selection” – and was subjected to more invasive airport security measures.
The FBI’s investigation into anti-Keystone activists was closed in June 2014 due to a lack of credible intelligence regarding threats to the pipeline and extremist activity.
According to internal agency documents obtained by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal, it was discovered in August 2013 that the FBI’s investigation had been opened without proper approval from the chief legal counsel of the agency’s Houston division and a senior agent, resulting in a report of “substantial non-compliance” with rules set out by the US Justice Department.
But before the internal violations were discovered, information on Stroot and several other activists was included in FBI files. Now, interviews with Stroot, who was held up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport six months after the investigation was closed, and other protesters indicate that they are still being monitored by law enforcement.
Stroot and two other people involved in the protests were described in the files as having separate, larger “Subject” files in the FBI’s Guardian Threat Tracking System, a repository for suspicious activity reports and counterterrorism threat assessments that can be searched by all FBI employees.
How the US’s terrorism watchlists work – and how you could end up on one
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Hugh Handeyside, an attorney with the ACLU in New York, said the government’s suspicious activity reporting program is often tied to placement on a watchlist.
“Both label people as suspicious according to low standards that inevitably include innocent conduct,” he said. “And this case shows that the two may be linked.”
According to a long-withheld US watchlist guidance document published last year by the Intercept, people who do not meet the criteria for inclusion on the no-fly list but who are associated with “terrorist activity” may be placed on a selectee list like the one Bradley Stroot found himself on. Some 16,000 people – 1,200 of them US citizens – have been identified as so called “selectees” who must undergo heightened screenings at border crossings or airports.
From photos at the pipeline to a pat-down at the airport
fbi stroot
Bradley Stroot was one of three people detained by Houston police for taking photographs of an endpoint for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Four days later, a terrorism unit of the FBI reviewed the incident. Information on Stroot and other ‘suspicious individuals’ was kept in the agency’s ‘Guardian’ repository for tracking suspicious activity and terrorism-involved activities.
On 13 December 2014, Stroot said, he prepared to board a flight from Chicago to Dallas to see an old friend – his first air travel since his 10-month involvement in a campaign in the Houston area against the proposed Keystone project.
While in Texas the first time, he had been arrested once for trespassing after taking part in a widely publicized occupation of part of the pipeline route that included a “tree village”.
And on 15 November 2012, Stroot and two other activists were stopped by the Houston police department while taking photos of the Valero refinery, one of the endpoints for tar sands oil. Although they were not charged with any crime, details of the incident ended up in an FBI file – part of more than 80 pages of internal FBI documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request – that described the activists as “suspicious individuals”. Four days later, the police officers met with members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to discuss the incident.
The encounter with the Houston police left Stroot somewhat shaken but determined to continue protesting. He says he had flown once to Europe – before the Keystone campaign began in Texas in 2012 – and had no issues.
But when he printed his American Airlines plane ticket in December, he noticed four S’s in large black letters in the top left corner. So-called “Secondary Security Screening Selection” helps Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security officers single out travelers, with no explanation, for heightened screening at airports.
bradley stroot pass
Secondary Security Screening Selection (SSSS) led Bradley Stroot to a more invasive pat-down on both legs of his return trip to Texas. Photograph: Courtesy of Bradley Stroot
When Stroot arrived at Chicago O’Hare, he said, he was subjected to heightened security screening – removed from the main passenger line and taken to a separate holding area where another airline security official was waiting. His bags, Stroot alleged, were carefully searched and he was subjected to a more invasive pat-down. He said the same thing happened on his return flight to Chicago.
“They pull you out of line, swab down all of your shit with tongue depressor-like things, and check for bomb-making materials,” Stroot said.
TSA’s failures start long before screeners fail to detect bombs in security tests
Jason Edward Harrington
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But there were signs that Stroot had become a subject of interest to law enforcement even before he learned he was on a watchlist.
One night in spring 2013, just a few months after he had returned home to Indiana from Texas, Stroot said he was helping out at a makeshift homeless shelter in Bloomington, sleeping in a friend’s truck, when a police officer knocked on the window and asked for identification.
When the officer returned from running his ID, Stroot claims that he was aggressively questioned and that the officer asked if he could look in the truck, which had an open cab. “You could see there was nothing in it,” Stroot said.
After what he recalls as minutes more of questioning, Stroot said the officer finally asked if he had “any bomb-making materials”.
From video in the trees to detention at the border – and at home
Tar Sands Blockade occupy the corporate offices of TransCanada on 7 January 2013 Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Andrew Neef took part in a January 2013 protest at the Houston offices of TransCanada, the Canadian oil giant that would oversee the Keystone XL pipeline. Internal FBI documents show the agency willing to share ‘any pertinent intelligence regarding any threats’ with the company; the documents also show Neef included in files describing ‘Threats to Keystone XL Pipeline Projects’. Photograph: Tar Sands Blockade
Stroot is not the only anti-Keystone XL activist who has been targeted since the Texas protest campaign and parallel FBI investigation.
Elizabeth Arce, a 27-year-old independent journalist, traveled to Texas with a friend in October 2012 to help document the tree sit-in that ended in Stroot’s arrest. After spending a week in the trees live-streaming video of the protest, she said, they ran out of batteries and descended, hoping that as journalists they might avoid arrest from the police waiting underfoot.
I think the storyline of TransCanada and authorities communicating further than we think is plausible
Elizabeth Arce
Arce and her friend, Lorenzo Serna, were arrested for trespassing but all the charges were dropped.
In April 2013, Arce was on her way to Canada for an Earth Day event hosted by an indigenous group in Ontario. At the border crossing in Minnesota, Arce said, Canadian border agents asked her about the arrest in Texas, searched her car and eventually let her pass.
But this past August, Arce said she, Serna and another friend were driving to Canada to document the aftermath of the Mount Polley mine disaster in British Columbia and were denied entry.
At the crossing in Sweetgrass, Montana, Arce said agents at the border asked her detailed questions about her arrest in Texas. They searched the car for “hours”, she said, going through every piece of luggage and scrap of paper, even referring to her trombone as a “noisemaker”. After being detained for five hours, she said she and her friends were told that they could not cross into Canada because, she remembered an agent telling her, they “seemed like protesters”.
In the FBI files, the agency’s Houston office said it would share “any pertinent intelligence regarding any threats” with TransCanada, the Canadian oil giant that has been lobbying for years to oversee the transport of tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast. The project is still awaiting approval from the Obama administration.
“I think the storyline of TransCanada and authorities communicating further than we think is plausible,” Arce said.
(In a statement, TransCanada said the company does not “direct law enforcement” but that “law enforcement officials have asked us on a number of occasions about our experience along the Gulf Coast Pipeline so they can determine what they may expect when Keystone XL construction begins”.)
Andrew Neef, a 31-year-old data archivist from Minnesota, also spent time in Texas in 2012 and 2013. He was part of a mass action on 7 January 2013, at the Houston offices of TransCanada, and was arrested for trespassing along with another activist, Alec Johnson. Because he did not have a permanent address at the time and was not living in Texas, Neef entered his parents’ address on the police report. Neef and Johnson are both referred to in the FBI files obtained by the Guardian, which detail that the FBI had advance knowledge of the TransCanada sit-in and debriefed an informant on the event after it happened.
stroot fbi
An internal FBI document detailing the January 2013 arrest of Andrew Neef and Alec Johnson labeled them as ‘Threats to Keystone XL Pipeline Projects’. Neef said the peaceful protest haunted him, with authorities later showing up at his parents’ front door.
About a month after the Houston arrest, Neef said his parents were visited by members of the Indiana division of the FBI’s joint terrorism task force at their home in Carmel, an upscale Indianapolis suburb.
According to Neef, who also works as an independent-media journalist, the agents asked his parents several questions about the people he knew, whom he was working with, and where his funding came from. They also wanted to know, Neef said, if he was involved in anti-fracking campaigns.
“They wanted me to contact them,” Neef said, “and probably become some kind of snitch.”
(The FBI’s Houston field office did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.)
More than a year later, the FBI investigation into anti-Keystone pipeline campaigners in Texas was formally closed due to a “lack of reporting and/or extremist activity”. But the FBI retains data on individuals even if the purported threat turns out to be non-existent.
For young activists like Bradley Stroot, the stigma of being on a government watchlist can last for years. Stroot said he was resigned to the “new reality” that he may be on the list for “the rest of my life or a very long period”.
Once an individual has been placed on the selective screening watchlist, there is very little he or she can do to get removed from it, said Handeyside of the ACLU, or even find out why he or she was put on it in the first place.
“There’s no due process for these people,” he said.
Adam Federman is a contributing editor of Earth Island Journal.
Monday 8 June 2015 13.30 BST Last modified on Wednesday 17 June 2015 21.30 BST
Find this story at 8 June 2015
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Houston investigation amounted to ‘substantial non-compliance’ of rules
Internal memo labels pipeline opponents as ‘environmental extremists’
FBI failed to get approval before it opened files on protesters in Texas
The FBI breached its own internal rules when it spied on campaigners against the Keystone XL pipeline, failing to get approval before it cultivated informants and opened files on individuals protesting against the construction of the pipeline in Texas, documents reveal.
Internal agency documents show for the first time how FBI agents have been closely monitoring anti-Keystone activists, in violation of guidelines designed to prevent the agency from becoming unduly involved in sensitive political issues.
The hugely contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which is awaiting approval from the Obama administration, would transport tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf coast.
It has been strongly opposed for years by a coalition of environmental groups, including some involved in nonviolent civil disobedience who have been monitored by federal law enforcement agencies.
The documents reveal that one FBI investigation, run from its Houston field office, amounted to “substantial non-compliance” of Department of Justice rules that govern how the agency should handle sensitive matters.
One FBI memo, which set out the rationale for investigating campaigners in the Houston area, touted the economic advantages of the pipeline while labelling its opponents “environmental extremists”.
FBI Keystone memo Facebook Twitter Pinterest
An FBI memo labels opponents of the controversial pipeline as ‘environmental extremists’. Photograph: Guardian
FBI Keystone memo Facebook Twitter Pinterest
An FBI memo detailing ‘non-compliance’ by the Houston field office. Photograph: Guardian
“Many of these extremists believe the debates over pollution, protection of wildlife, safety, and property rights have been overshadowed by the promise of jobs and cheaper oil prices,” the FBI document states. “The Keystone pipeline, as part of the oil and natural gas industry, is vital to the security and economy of the United States.”
The documents are among more than 80 pages of previously confidential FBI files obtained by the Guardian and Earth Island Journal after a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Between November 2012 and June 2014, the documents show, the FBI collated inside knowledge about forthcoming protests, documented the identities of individuals photographing oil-related infrastructure, scrutinised police intelligence and cultivated at least one informant.
It is unclear whether the source or sources were protesters-turned-informants, private investigators or hackers. One source is referred to in the documents as having had “good access and a history of reliable reporting”.
The FBI investigation targeted Tar Sands Blockade, a direct action group that was at the time campaigning in southern Texas.
However, the partially redacted documents reveal the investigation into anti-Keystone activists occurred without prior approval of the top lawyer and senior agent in the Houston field office, a stipulation laid down in rules provided by the attorney general.
Confronted by evidence contained in the cache of documents, the agency admitted that “FBI approval levels required by internal policy were not initially obtained” for the investigation, but said the failure was remedied and later reported internally.
The FBI files appear to suggest the Houston branch of the investigation was opened in early 2013, several months after a high-level strategy meeting between the agency and TransCanada, the company building the pipeline.
For a period of time – possibly as long as eight months – agents acting beyond their authority were monitoring activists aligned with Tar Sands Blockade.
Tar Sands Blockade appeared on the FBI’s radar in late 2012, not long after the group began organising in east Houston, the end destination for Keystone’s 1,660-mile pipeline.
Environmental activists affiliated with the group were committed to peaceful civil disobedience that can involve minor infractions of law, such as trespass. But they had no history of violent or serious crime.
Ron Seifert, a key organiser at Tar Sands Blockade, said dozens of campaigners were arrested in Texas for protest-related activity around that time, but not one of them was accused of violent crime or property destruction.
The group focused on Houston’s heavily industrialised neighbourhood of Manchester, where the Valero Energy Corporation has a massive refinery capable of processing heavy crude oil.
Between early November 2012 and June 2014, the documents show, the FBI collated inside-knowledge about forthcoming protests, documented the identities of individuals photographing oil-related infrastructure, scrutinised police intelligence and cultivated at least one informant.
FBI memo Facebook Twitter Pinterest
‘The Houston Division had identified an emerging threat from environmental extremists targeting construction projects of the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline within the Houston Domain.’ Photograph: Guardian
It is unclear whether the source or sources were protesters-turned-informants, private investigators or hackers. One source is referred to in the documents as having had “good access, and a history of reliable reporting”.
At one point, the FBI’s Houston office said it would share with TransCanada “any pertinent intelligence regarding any threats” to the company in advance of a forthcoming protest.
One of the files refers to Houston police officers who stopped two men and a woman taking photographs near the city’s industrial port, noting they were using a “large and sophisticated looking” camera.
Two of the individuals were described as having larger subject files in the FBI’s Guardian Threat Tracking System.
In another incident, the license plate belonging to a Silver Dodge was dutifully entered into the FBI’s database, after a “source” spotted the driver and another man photographing a building associated with TransCanada.
Sensitive matters
The FBI rules, laid out in the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, dictate that special care should be taken over sensitive investigations such as those targeting elected officials, journalists and political organisations.
FBI work on “sensitive investigative matters” requires prior approval of both the chief division counsel (CDC), the top lawyer in the field office, and the special agent in charge (SAC).
Both are supposed to consider the severity of the threat and the consequences of “adverse impact on civil liberties and public confidence” should the investigation be made public.
Keystone protest Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Tar Sands Blockade occupy the corporate offices of TransCanada in January 2013. Photograph: Laura Borealis/Tar Sands Blockade
However, neither Houston’s CDC or SAC were consulted in relation to the FBI’s monitoring of Tar Sands Blockade activists, the documents show.
Explaining the breach of protocols, the FBI said in a statement that it was committed to “act properly under the law”.
“While the FBI approval levels required by internal policy were not initially obtained, once discovered, corrective action was taken, non-compliance was remedied, and the oversight was properly reported through the FBI’s internal oversight mechanism,” it said.
The FBI did not deny opening an investigation into anti-Keystone campaigners, and said it was compelled to “take the initiative to secure and protect activities and entities which may be targeted for terrorism or espionage”.
But the precise nature of the FBI’s investigation, which continued for almost a year after the Houston Division acknowledged it had violated protocol, remains unclear.
The documents appear to suggest the investigation was one branch of a wider set of investigations, possibly including anti-Keystone activists elsewhere in the country.
The documents connect the investigation into anti-Keystone activists to other “domestic terrorism issues” in the agency and show there was some liaison with the local FBI “assistant weapons of mass destruction coordinator”.
Mike German, a former FBI agent, who assisted the Guardian in deciphering the bureau’s documentation, said they indicated the agency had opened a category of investigation that is known in agency parlance as an “assessment”.
Introduced as part of an expansion of FBI powers after 9/11, assessments allow agents to open intrusive investigations into individuals or groups, even if they have no reason to believe they are breaking the law.
German, now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said the documents also raised questions over collusion between law enforcement and TransCanada.
“It is clearly troubling that these documents suggest the FBI interprets its national security mandate as protecting private industry from political criticism,” he said.
According to the FBI documents, the FBI concluded there were “no adverse consequences” emanating from its failure to seek approval for the sensitive investigation, noting the mistake was later “remedied”.
The investigation continued for 11 months after the mistake was spotted. It was closed after the FBI’s Houston division acknowledged its failure to find sufficient evidence of “extremist activity”.
Before closing the case, however, agents noted the existence of a file that was to be used as a repository for future intelligence “regarding the Keystone XL pipeline”.
Since then, at least a dozen anti-tar sands campaigners in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho have been contacted by the FBI. The agency has said they are not under investigation.
Adam Federman is a contributing editor of Earth Island Journal
Paul Lewis in Washington and Adam Federman
Tuesday 12 May 2015 11.59 BST Last modified on Tuesday 12 May 2015 23.11 BST
Find this story at 12 May 2015
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation violated its own guidelines in 2013 when it investigated environmental advocates who opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, the F.B.I. acknowledged on Tuesday.
The bureau had received information about plots to damage part of the existing Keystone pipeline, which moves oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal law enforcement officials. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would create a shortcut for a significant section of the system.
As part of the investigation, agents at the F.B.I.’s field office in Houston communicated with sources, who gathered information from environmental advocates. The agents also conducted database searches on the advocates and reviewed local law enforcement reports about them. But the agents had not received approval from the head of their office and from its chief lawyer.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
Paula Antoine at a “spirit camp” set up by the Rosebud Sioux tribe near the planned route of Keystone XL in South Dakota.Grass-Roots Push in the Plains to Block the Keystone Pipeline’s PathMAY 5, 2015
That authorization was required under F.B.I. investigative guidelines intended to prevent agents from abusing powers that are most often used in national security and criminal investigations.
After an audit led by the bureau’s headquarters in Washington revealed that the agents had not received authorization, the agents asked for permission and got it. The investigation ultimately found no evidence that the protesters were plotting to damage the pipeline, and it was closed.
The Guardian first reported the investigation on Tuesday.
As the F.B.I. changed its focus to national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it began building closer relationships with the nation’s largest companies as it worked to protect the country’s critical infrastructure. Many of those companies — like TransCanada, which owns the pipeline — are frequently targets of environmental protests, and issues of free speech and national security can become intertwined.
The F.B.I. said on Tuesday that it had not conducted a full investigation into the protesters — only an assessment, its least invasive inquiry. The bureau said it had looked into the accusations because the threats were against “the oil and gas industry, and the energy sector is considered a part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.”
It characterized the mistake by the agents as an “administrative error” that “was discovered by the F.B.I.’s internal oversight mechanisms.”
“While the F.B.I. approval levels required by internal policy were not initially obtained, once discovered, corrective action was taken, noncompliance was remedied, and the oversight was properly reported through the F.B.I.’s internal oversight mechanism,” the bureau said. “At no time did the review find that the initial justification for the assessment was improper.”
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTMAY 12, 2015
Find this story at 12 May 2015
© 2015 The New York Times Company
In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak to environmental activist Eric McDavid, who has just been released from prison 10 years early after federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding key evidence about how he may have been entrapped by an FBI informant with whom he had fallen in love. In 2008, McDavid was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to bomb sites in California including the Nimbus Dam. Defense attorneys say he was entrapped by a teenage informant who went by the name “Anna” and supplied him with food, housing and bomb-making instructions, and pressured him into illegal activity. As part of a settlement reached in the case on Thursday, federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding key evidence, including an FBI request for the informant to undergo a lie-detector test. This damning detail about the government’s star witness was found in thousands of documents released after his trial, when his supporters filed a Freedom of Information Act request. In his first interview since his release, McDavid joins us from Sacramento along with his partner Jenny Esquivel, a member of the group Sacramento Prisoner Support. We are also joined by McDavid’s lawyer, Ben Rosenfeld, a civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Just a week ago, our next guest was a federal prisoner, serving a 19-year sentence for “eco-terrorism” in what his supporters say was a case of FBI entrapment. Today, he’s a free man. In 2007, Eric McDavid was convicted of conspiring to bomb sites in California including the Nimbus Dam. But his attorneys say he was entrapped by a teenage informant who went by the name “Anna” and supplied him with food, housing and bomb-making instructions, and pressured him into illegal activity. Two others arrested in the plot testified against McDavid in a deal that led to lighter sentences.
AMY GOODMAN: For them. Well, as part of a settlement reached in the case on Thursday, federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding evidence in McDavid’s case, including an FBI request for the informant to undergo a lie-detector test. This damning detail about the government’s star witness was found in thousands of documents released after his trial, when his supporters filed a Freedom of Information Act request. During a hearing, federal judge Morrison England demanded to know how the prosecution failed to give potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense, saying, quote, “This is huge. This is something that needs to be dealt with,” the judge said. McDavid pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge with a maximum five-year sentence. He had already served nine years in prison, and he was released.
Eric McDavid now joins us from Sacramento for his first interview since his release. With him, his partner Jenny Esquivel, a member of the group Sacramento Prisoner Support. And in San Francisco, we’re joined by Ben Rosenfeld, McDavid’s lawyer. He is a civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct. He’s also an advisory board member of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Eric, let’s begin with you. How does it feel to be free?
ERIC McDAVID: There is no definition to that. There’s no way to express that with, I don’t think, any language, definitely not the English language.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it is—
ERIC McDAVID: But it’s definitely beautiful to be with my family.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what—how critical the information was that had you released.
ERIC McDAVID: I think that’s pretty obvious. And to tell you the truth, I think Ben could address that with a lot more clarity.
AMY GOODMAN: OK, Ben Rosenfeld in San Francisco, can you talk about what has taken place in this case? I mean, here you have Eric McDavid, who was supposed to serve 19 years in prison. He’s being released a decade early. Why?
BEN ROSENFELD: Eleven years early, actually. And this was about as egregious a case of entrapment as I’ve seen in my entire legal career. And I should point out, too, that what they’ve done to Eric, they visit a thousandfold on Muslims in this country, so it’s very important that we raise public awareness about this.
But in Eric’s case, in particular, a number of FOIA documents were turned over after the case was long concluded. And supporters started going through those documents, and they went, “Aha, this is stuff that should have been turned over to the defense that would have been absolutely critical to his defense.” It included evidence that the government had called urgently for a lie-detector examination of their informant and then inexplicably canceled it. There are indications that letters of a romantic nature that they had withheld from the defense were included in their files. But even the FOIA was the tip of the iceberg, because it pointed to or hinted at some of those documents, but didn’t include them. And we—as his lawyers, we incorporated that into his habeas claim, and the court showed interest in that. And ultimately, that set the table for his release, when the government was forced to admit that they had in fact withheld documents that should have been turned over to the defense.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ben Rosenfeld, the informant in this case is a critical part of what happened here. In 2008, Elle magazine featured an article about how the FBI paid a young woman, known as “Anna,” to befriend activists and pressure them into illegal activity. It describes in detail her relationship with Eric McDavid and her role in the case against him. In an interview for the piece, Anna says when the group planned to blow up the Nimbus Dam, her role was to track down bomb recipes. She said, quote, “I go to the FBI with this and they said, Well, of course we’re not going to give you bomb recipes that actually work. So they gave me about half a dozen recipes that were all missing components.” Could you talk about the role of Anna? Because she supposedly was involved in gathering evidence as an informant against many activists in the environmental movement.
BEN ROSENFELD: Well, thank you. I want to point out first, there was never any plan to blow up the Nimbus Dam. There was actually never any plan to do anything. There was a lot of talk. And whatever plans there were, were 100 percent the FBI’s and Anna’s. I mean, this is a clear-cut case of entrapment. It’s a case of the government creating and then solving its own so-called conspiracy. The Nimbus Dam, if there was any agreement among the co-defendants in this case, it was specifically not to blow up the Nimbus Dam.
But, yes, Anna entrapped them by literally herding them together from around the country, by plying them with the matériel they needed, by sheltering them and providing them food and transportation, and literally gathering them back together and trying to keep them interested in her plans and her schemes. And each of them, for their own reasons, was trying to please and placate her. It was a lot of talk. It was no action. Nothing was ever done. Nothing was ever agreed upon. Certainly, nothing was ever blown up.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk about the case, Jenny, why you got involved, with Sacramento Prisoner Support, Jenny Esquivel, and how you applied for this information under the Freedom of Information Act?
JENNY ESQUIVEL: Sure. I came to Sacramento immediately after Eric was arrested. He and I were partners right before he got arrested. And so, I came here just to be closer to him and do support work for him, and that’s how I originally got involved in Sacramento Prisoner Support.
As far as the FOIA goes, you know, Mark Reichel, Eric’s original attorney for trial, filed a FOIA request before Eric’s trial in 2007. And at the time, the FBI responded, saying that they had no records responsive to our request, which was interesting. Also, clearly, it was a lie, as at that time we had thousands of pages of discovery that the government had turned over to us for trial. So, we were pretty busy, obviously, at that point in time with trial, also trying to support Eric while he was on hunger strike, trying to get vegan food at the Sacramento County Main Jail. And so, we just didn’t really have time to follow through on that or pursue it, even though we knew that they clearly did have records responsive to our request. So, after Eric was convicted and sentenced in 2008, we filed another Freedom of Information Act request, and about a year and a half later, we started finally receiving records that were responsive to that request. And at that time, we received three or four different packages of documents equaling about 2,500 pages. One other interesting thing about that, though, is that the government admitted to not handing over almost 900 more pages of information. And we still haven’t seen those documents. We still don’t know what’s in those documents, and perhaps, unfortunately, never will.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eric McDavid, can you talk about your reaction when you discovered that this Anna, the informant, was an informant and had been taping conversations, the very person who was trying to instigate activity among you and other activists? And your reaction to her testimony in court?
ERIC McDAVID: Well, initially, to your first question, it was as I was sitting on the back of the car and I heard the locks click all the way around on the automatic lock of the vehicle that she was sitting in, while she was talking on the phone, as about eight—I don’t know, eight to 10 different vehicles pulled screeching up in front of me with JTTF hopping out, AR-15s, everybody all ready to roll. So, I mean, that’s—that was the first when it clicked. So it wasn’t—I had a whole bunch on my mind at the time, so it wasn’t really a predominant or a huge thought.
During trial, that part, after—because I had read a whole bunch of the discovery, and we’d gone over transcripts and everything. And it was difficult to see, definitely, but—I don’t know. It was definitely hard to see. I mean, that part was definitely one of the more harder rides of the whole trial.
AMY GOODMAN: This is an excerpt—
ERIC McDAVID: After—
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to an excerpt of an exchange between, well, the woman who calls herself Anna—and for folks who are listening on the radio, we’re also showing pictures of her; she was featured, as we said, in Elle magazine—the exchange between Anna and Eric McDavid and another activist, Lauren Weiner, when they were in the cabin allegedly planning to bomb the Nimbus Dam. Anna says, “Tomorrow, what are we planning on doing tomorrow? Are we still planning on doing anything tomorrow? Or should I just stop talking about plans?” Eric McDavid says, “Hmmm.” Weiner says, “I would love it if you stopped talking.” Anna says, “I would love it if you guys followed a plan! How about that!” Ben Rosenfeld, what is the significance of this back-and-forth?
BEN ROSENFELD: The significance of that back-and-forth is that it really illustrates 100 percent a case of egregious and grotesque entrapment by the government. Anna literally called them names and threw fits when they didn’t show enough enthusiasm for her plans. And I think that excerpt illustrates that perfectly.
You know, for—and—and I would also point out that right now the government wants to skate away on the claim that this was purely a mistake or inadvertent, on the back of a press office statement. And whether it was a mistake or it was malfeasance or it was malevolence to withhold these documents, they really owe it to Eric, and they owe it to the public, to come up with a much more detailed explanation about how this could have happened. I mean, you know, the deck is completely stacked in their favor. I mean, the job of the defense, in essence, is to go fishing in their deck to ask, “Do you have anything?” And if you’re told they don’t have anything, you’re stuck with that answer, and sometimes for a long time and sometimes forever—in Eric’s case, for nine years of wrongful incarceration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Ben, in this situation where prosecutors clearly, deliberately withhold evidence, possibly exculpatory evidence—I’ve seen so many of these cases over the years—isn’t it the responsibility, to some degree, of the judge to insist that an investigation be conducted, because the trial itself was so tainted as a result of these actions of the prosecutors?
BEN ROSENFELD: We’d certainly like to see the judge do that. We’d like to see the judiciary take that up. And there’s some indications by Ninth Circuit judges that they are very concerned about a potential epidemic of Brady violations. Brady is the Supreme Court case that speaks to the withholding of documents. I would point out, too, that from a legal standpoint it doesn’t matter whether it was inadvertent or deliberate. If they withheld documents which were helpful to the defense—in this case, documents showing that there was a romantic interest by Eric, a correspondence between Eric and Anna that the prosecutors held back, and a reciprocation by Anna—that’s good enough to satisfy that constitutional standard and to win release. It should be, but it’s very rare that it happens. And you can see that it takes years and years and years to correct a mistake which should have been corrected a long time ago. And there are a lot of people behind bars who may never get that chance.
AMY GOODMAN: The 2008 Elle article about the Eric McDavid case quotes a juror named Diane Bennett, who was tracked down by the reporter after the trial. Bennett said, quote, “I’ve been bothered by this ever since that day. … [T]he FBI was an embarrassment. … I hope he gets a new trial. I’m not happy with the one he got.” Diane Bennett added, the foreman had “teared up” when he delivered the guilty verdict. She said the judge’s instructions were confusing, but, quote, “People were tired. … We wanted to go home.” Can you talk about the significance of this, Ben Rosenfeld?
BEN ROSENFELD: Well, and she said that so long ago, and it just goes to show how long you can live in this Kafkaesque nightmare, where the government has engaged in total misconduct and the court, perhaps, has abdicated a responsibility to oversee this or maybe is hoodwinked along with the defense because of the overly trusting role and excessive trust that it places sometimes in the government and the prosecutor. I mean, in court on January 8th, the day that Eric walked free, I’ve never seen so many fireworks. And the judge really grilled the prosecutors, and he showed a lot of—a lot of personal pique and interest in getting to the bottom of this. And I really hope that he or somebody does follow up.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you—could you explain the deal that was struck at the end, though?
BEN ROSENFELD: Yeah. You know, Eric had to plead to a simple or general conspiracy count with a maximum penalty of five years. The judge vacated the original conviction and sentence of 20 years on a different charge. So the government extracts its pound of flesh. That’s probably as much justice as you’re going to get out of the Department of Just—Injustice in a case like this. Eric had to waive all civil claims, going forward.
But he’s here now, and we’re extremely grateful for that and for everybody that made that possible and, I will say, too, the team of U.S. attorneys at the end of the case, who behaved extremely honorably and professionally in taking a fresh look at this and enabling that to happen, too. But it took a collaboration of a lot of people to end this nightmare. And there are a lot of people left in prison who are the victims of this kind of government malfeasance also, and there needs to be an inquiry.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, could you talk, in the about a minute and a half we have left, of your time in prison? Did you expect at some point to be able to get out and to have this nightmare behind you?
ERIC McDAVID: I had a buddy at the medium-security prison where I was first held who always challenged me in keeping my mind open and keeping my heart open and making sure that I was ready for anything. And given the intensity of that environment, it definitely helped me to adapt to that whole situation. But he was always—every other week or every other day, he’d hit me up: “You ready to go home? You ready to go home?” I’m like, “Yes, I’m ready to go home.” And he’s like, “All right, so here’s the situation how you’re going to go home. Tell me how you’re going to do it.” And so, that part was always kept alive. And the amount of support that I got from folks has just—it’s blown my heart open every day and every moment that I’ve been—that I was away from my friends and family and my loved ones.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Eric, did you meet other people behind bars who you felt were entrapped like you were?
ERIC McDAVID: There is so many people that either are entrapped in the same way or pressured into taking a sentence because they’re threatened with 60, 70 years of prison, and they have to do the 15, or they have to do the 17, or even 20, because otherwise they’re going to spend the rest of their life back there. That was time and time again.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eric McDavid, we want to thank you for being with us. Congratulations on your release. He was released from prison Thursday, less than a week after federal prosecutors [acknowledged withholding] key evidence in the 2008 trial that led to his conviction on eco-terrorism charges. Jenny Esquivel, member of the Sacramento Prisoner Support, also Eric McDavid’s partner. And thanks to Ben Rosenfeld, joining us from San Francisco, the civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct, the attorney for Eric McDavid.
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2015
Find this story at 14 January 2015
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In the case of Eric McDavid, alleged to be ring-leader of eco-terrorist cell, ‘game-changing’ documents seen exclusively by the Guardian show informant may have entrapped him
On the surface, she blended in very well. With a skull tattooed on her shoulder, a black-and-white keffiyeh around her neck, a shock of bright pink hair and her standard-issue dress of camouflage skirt and heavy boots, the energetic 17-year-old looked every bit the radical eco-activist she worked so hard to imitate.
But “Anna”, as she called herself, was no ordinary eco-protester. Really, she wasn’t one at all. She was an FBI informant under instructions to infiltrate fringe green groups and anti-capitalist networks and report back on their activities to the US government.
Now “Anna”, in her role at the center of a high-profile prosecution of alleged eco-terrorists in 2006-7, has been put under the spotlight following the embarrassing admission by the US Department of Justice that it failed to disclose crucial documents to defence attorneys at trial.
On Thursday, Eric McDavid, a radical green activist aged 37, was allowed to walk free after having served nine years of a 19-year federal prison sentence. Prosecutors had alleged that he was the ringleader in a small cell of eco-terrorists connected to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) conspiring to bomb the Nimbus Dam in California, cellphone towers, science labs and other targets.
Last week’s dramatic scenes in a courtroom in Sacramento, California, have focused attention on the FBI’s use of undercover informants and prompted claims that the agency lured unsuspecting activists into criminal activity through blatant entrapment.
But last November, the US attorney’s office in the eastern district of California admitted that it had “inadvertently” failed to disclose numerous documents that went to the very heart of the case. Crucially, those previously undisclosed files included correspondence between “Anna” and McDavid that suggests that, far from being the neutral intelligence-gatherer portrayed by prosecutors, she might have entrapped her prey by encouraging him to behave conspiratorially in the hope of romantic fulfilment.
‘I think you and I could be great’
Among the files are a letter and 10 emails written by McDavid to the teenaged woman he thought at the time to be his friend, peer and potential sexual partner. The writings have been seen by the Guardian and extracts of them are published here for the first time.
In the letter, McDavid declared his love for “Anna”, though he coyly added that he was not sure whether his feelings for her amounted to “just infatuation, a crush, or whatever box anybody has for this emotion”. Scrawled diagonally across the page in spindly script, his words expressed the trepidation of someone unused to venting openly his emotions. He feared that unless he shared his feelings, they would “eat me from the inside out”.
“I hope that my forwardness w/expressing all this doesn’t scare the shit out of u,” he wrote, “cause I know if I got this letter I’d probably trip out a bit, to say the least …” Having opened his heart, he blurted out with palpable relief: “Fuck that feels soooooo much better.”
At McDavid’s 2006 trial, his defence team presented evidence to the jury that McDavid had fallen in love with the woman who would turn out to be his downfall. What wasn’t known at that time, and what is revealed by the newly disclosed documents, was that “Anna”, in her guise as a fellow radical, clearly reciprocated.
In an email dated 27 June 2005, six months before McDavid’s arrest, “Anna” responded explicitly to his previous amorous advances. She said: “I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out.” She went on to say: “I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”
The tone of romantic encouragement in the email had an immediate impact on McDavid. He replied three days later, using the ungrammatical language of texting: “hey cheeka, so far as us B’n great, that i think is an understatement… along w/the ‘LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out’… but if u aint learning, u aint live’n… & I do think we could learn a lot from each other.”
In subsequent emails, McDavid continued to express his feelings for her, sending her “big hugs” and saying “miss you much”. Only one of “Anna’s” replies to McDavid is included among the new batch of documents disclosed after so many years. In it she wrote intimately about her hairstyle: “I took out the braids. : ( They were hurting my head SO BADLY by the last night in philly that I was just getting pissy. I’ll do it again, but I think I want the loose pink hair, like I told you about; and I can DIY that. But pain isn’t worth that much – besides, identity is so fluid… but that’s another convo, hopefully for IN. : )”
The tone is almost flirtatious. McDavid evidently took it to be such, because he replied: “sad & glad 2 hear about the braids, glad 2 hear they Rn’t hurting u’r head anymore, sad 2 c them gone… they were pretty damn cute, & that princess laya thing was 2 hot (inside shiver)”.
McDavid’s treatment: ‘not fair’ or an ‘inadvertent mistake’?
Eric McDavid walks out of the Federal Courthouse in Sacramento after being released from prison
The judge in McDavid’s case expressed astonishment and dismay that game-changing documents had not been shown at 2007 trial, adding McDavid’s treatment was ‘not fair’. Photograph: Jose Luis Villegas/AP
It took McDavid’s defence team and his large band of devoted supporters seven years after he was sentenced to extract from the Justice Department those 11 precious documents. They were finally released on 6 November last year, fully two years after reference was made to their existence in a court declaration by “Anna’s” FBI handler, special agent Nasson Walker. That two-year delay alone belies the assurance made by the US attorney’s office in Sacramento to the New York Times after last week’s hearing that “the documents were produced to the defendant promptly after their discovery.”
At the hearing, federal judge Morrison England expressed astonishment and dismay that such game-changing documents had not been shown to the defence at the 10-day trial over which he had presided in 2007. “I’ve never heard or seen anything like this,” he said, adding that McDavid’s treatment was “not fair”.
The judge demanded to be told how such a flagrant breach of disclosure – under the 14th amendment of the US constitution, the prosecution must turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defence – could have occurred: “This is huge. This is something that needs to be dealt with, and I want to know what happened.”
McDavid’s current lawyers, Mark Vermeulen and Ben Rosenfeld, said the documents they battled for years to wrestle from US prosecutors would have transformed the trial had they been available at the time. “If the defence had the evidence it has now – that ‘Anna’ encouraged Eric’s romantic advances, leading him to believe that sexual fulfilment would be conditional on him following her plans – that would have confirmed in the jury’s mind that she entrapped him. He would have been acquitted, it’s as simple as that,” Rosenfeld told the Guardian.
If the defence had the evidence it has now … He would have been acquitted, it’s as simple as that.
Ben Rosenfeld
The Justice Department continues to insist it was all an “inadvertent” mistake. But that narrative does not cut it for McDavid’s legal team and supporters. “They took nine years of Eric’s life away from him and they shouldn’t be able to gloss over that with a press release – there needs to be a detailed explanation,” Rosenfeld said.
Concerns raised by the McDavid case about the use of undercover informants will resonate today given the FBI’s continued reliance upon infiltration as a major plank of its counter-terrorism strategy. Its paid moles, especially those planted within Muslim communities in the wake of 9/11, are regularly accused of crossing the line from observation into entrapment.
Rosenfeld said that McDavid’s story was a warning for today’s justice system: “When people see the TV news and hear of the latest foiled terrorist outrage they think ‘Wow! The FBI is so good at its job.’ But so many of these apparent plots are complete inventions of the government in the first place – they are creating and then solving their own conspiracies.”
‘I wanted to get a conversation going with everyone’
Throughout almost a decade of legal wrangling over the McDavid case, the mysterious “Anna” has been a constant factor. In her only known interview, for a 2008 article in Elle magazine, she posed for photographs in her normal outfit of jeans, T-shirt and suede jacket, her hair by then faded from lurid pink to its natural brown.
She told the magazine that 9/11 had motivated her to engage in counter-intelligence. A year after the attacks, when she was just 15, she contacted the Militarywomen.org website to inquire about enlisting in the army.
At a community college night class in Miami she tried to impress her professor by sneaking into a meeting of anti-free trade protesters for what she called “anthropological observation”. The report she presented to class so struck a police officer who was also taking the course that he passed her details to the Miami police department, which in turn quickly recommended her to the FBI.
Within months, she was going undercover among protesters at the G8 summit of leading economic powers in Atlanta. Over the next two years she was given more than 10 federal assignments, including infiltrating protest groups at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Boston and New York respectively, and delving into the world of radical environmental activism.
At the G8 she met an anarchist named Zach Jenson, and through him fellow eco-activists Lauren Weiner and McDavid who she first met in 2004. All three were eventually arrested, though Jenson and Weiner cut a deal with prosecutors in which they gave evidence against their co-defendant in exchange for a lesser sentence.
“Anna” told the jury at McDavid’s trial that she had been scrupulously impartial, sticking closely to legal guidelines for informants that forbade her from playing a leadership position in the group or from pushing anybody to do anything. Yet under cross-examination, she described some of the proactive steps she took to bring the “cell” together.
She bought plane tickets for Weiner to fly her to McDavid’s house for a group meeting. “I wanted to get a conversation going between everyone,” she said.
Later, she drove Weiner and Jenson across the country to meet McDavid, using a ’96 Chevrolet paid for by the FBI and kitted out with recording equipment. When Weiner showed signs of losing enthusiasm for the project, “Anna” sent her an email saying: “There’s no going back … I don’t want to be dilly-dallying around forever, which I know I could do and fall into that trap but I want to avoid you doing that too.”
In email correspondence that is included in the newly disclosed documents seen by the Guardian, “Anna” wrote to Weiner in September 2005, telling her “I’ve made some more contacts in Philly, esp with the animal liberation movement, which I’d like to bring you and the rest of teh (sic) crew more into. I already talked a little bit about it with [McDavid] – we could make a big difference on multiple fronts.”
In a later email, also to Weiner, she said: “I’d love to start helping you and the rest of the Philly kids in whatever your hearts find to do.”
The FBI also paid for a cabin in Dutch Flat, California, heavily rigged with surveillance devices, where “Anna” assembled the group, telling them she had earned the rent money working as a dancer-cum-escort. There she presented the others with a “burn book” containing six recipes for concocting firebombs, though she told the jury the devices were designed by the FBI to be duds.
‘The government owes it to Eric – to tell the truth’
As these final planning meetings for a potential attack on a science lab were taking place, the FBI appeared to grow jittery about an operation that depended entirely on “Anna”. In November 2005, just weeks before the three activists were arrested at the cabin, a formal request was made to subject her to a lie-detector test.
The request form says the purpose of the polygraph would be to “confirm veracity of [“Anna’s”] reporting prior to the expenditure of substantial efforts and money based on source’s reporting.”
The polygraph was disclosed to McDavid’s defence team under freedom of information laws in 2012, five years after the trial. A small, but potentially significant, footnote to the request form reveals that a senior federal prosecutor (AUSA) approved the test, though the identity of the official is redacted on grounds of “personal privacy”.
The emergence of the polygraph test, and of the romantically tinged correspondence, has incensed Mark Reichel who acted as McDavid’s lawyer at trial. He tried to mount an entrapment defence, having been told by his client of “Anna’s” amorous behaviour, but was ultimately stymied by lack of evidence.
Before the trial began Reichel filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds of an improper romance between informant and defendant. In it, he accused “Anna” of having “encouraged and urged him on, to write love letters and emails to her”. The US government’s response to the motion left no room for doubt: “The defendant’s claim of a romantic relationship between him and the informant is categorically untrue”.
I demanded to see the love letters before the trial, but the government told me they didn’t exist
Mark Reichel
“I demanded to see the love letters before the trial, but the government told me they didn’t exist,” Reichel said. “They wanted the world to see they had captured a member of ELF. He was innocent, they knew that, but they couldn’t let it be seen.”
The revelation of the newly disclosed documents is likely to prompt a flurry of litigation. Jeffrey Weiner, Lauren Weiner’s attorney (and cousin), told the Guardian that he was considering legal action to have her federal conviction lifted.
He said that “Anna” had encouraged a strong and intimate personal relationship with Lauren that was “so intense and continuous she literally took over Lauren’s will. ‘Anna’ chose the most gullible people that she could find and stopped at nothing to persuade them to commit criminal acts. I’m not saying my client did nothing, but her crime was created by the US government.”
For McDavid, too, this story is not at an end. As part of his release deal, he pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge with a terrorism enhancement attached, meaning that although he is a free man he will continue to labour under the stigma of a serious federal conviction.
Nor is the full extent of the official deception yet known. In 2010 the Justice Department released 2,500 pages relating to the case under freedom of information rules, but it refused to hand over a further 900 pages. What nuggets of information those pages contain, particularly among “Anna’s” replies to McDavid’s emails – most of which remain hidden – only the US government knows.
McDavid’s current partner, Jenny Esquivel, who has been a leading member of his support group, said she feared the remaining documents would never see the light of day. “The government keeps trying to frame this as a mistake, but they are the only people who knows what happened and they owe it to the American people – and to Eric – to tell the truth.”
She said that in the five days of freedom he has enjoyed, McDavid has revelled in being reunited with his family and spending time with his two nieces, both of whom were born while he was in prison. “The girls were overjoyed when they heard the news that he was coming home. It was almost impossible to pull them away from him while they were here,” she said.
Amid his joy, McDavid hasn’t lost sight, Esquivel said, of those who remain in the clutches of FBI entrapment. “The travesty is that so many people are dealing right now with exactly the same problem. Hundreds are serving decades in prison for crimes that never happened.”
Ed Pilkington in New York
@edpilkington
Tuesday 13 January 2015 20.01 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 13 January 2015 23.50 GMT
Find this story at 13 January 2015
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Eric McDavid sentenced to nearly 20 years in 2007 for conspiring to bomb one or more targets including electric power stations and cellphone towers
Eric McDavid.
Eric McDavid, who the US government has considered an eco-terrorist since 2007, was released on Thursday night after a judge determined that important documents related to his case had been filed away in an FBI office.
The government handed over thousands of pages of documents – including love notes from from McDavid to an informant – as part of a trial this week in Sacramento, California.
“I’ve never heard or seen of anything like this,” said US district judge Morrison England, the same man who sentenced McDavid in 2007. England ordered McDavid be released and asked to be given information showing how such evidence was hidden.
“I know [McDavid is] not necessarily a choirboy, but he doesn’t deserve to go through this, either,” England told the Sacramento Bee. “It’s not fair.”
McDavid, 37, was three days away from having spent nine years in prison. As part of the agreement, McDavid pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count and was released with time served.
His lawyers say he was entrapped by an FBI informant – “Anna” – the recipient of the love notes which were hidden away in the FBI office. She was named in the trial and was the subject of a feature in Elle magazine. McDavid’s supporters say she encouraged him to engage in violent acts against the government while suggesting future romantic encounters.
McDavid was arrested in January 2006, and sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison in September 2007. He was convicted of conspiring to bomb one or more targets including electric power stations, California’s Nimbus Dam, cell phone towers and the United States Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics.
A September 2007 release from the FBI said he and two others, in the presence of “a confidential source”, met at his parents’ house, purchased a book with instructions on how to make homemade bombs, and bought the necessary supplies.
McDavid’s lawyers had been searching for more evidence, but did not receive confirmation from the government about the existence of the hidden documents until recently.
It is not yet clear why the documents sat in the Sacramento FBI office as McDavid served his sentence in a prison near Los Angeles.
“We don’t know exactly why they weren’t turned over,” the chief of the US attorney’s criminal division, John Vincent, told the court.
The US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of California acknowledged that the government’s failure to produce the documents is grounds for a retrial, but both sides agreed to the deal without a retrial to avoid further possible litigation on both sides.
“As the United States stated at the hearing, the nondisclosure was inadvertent, and the documents were produced to the defendant promptly after their discovery,” the office said in a statement.
Soon after England reached his decision, McDavid left a federal building in Sacramento and was met by his parents, sister and girlfriend.
“We are thrilled beyond word that Eric is coming home to us after nine years in prison,” Eric’s mother, Eileen McDavid, said in a statement on behalf of the family.
“We never stopped believing he was wrongly accused. Blessing to all those who made his early release possible.”
Amanda Holpuch in Washington
Friday 9 January 2015 15.35 GMT Last modified on Friday 9 January 2015 23.53 GMT
Find this story at 9 January 2015
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
An extraordinary thing happened last month: US prosecutors admitted the government messed up.
Well, technically they admitted that a judge could conceivably decide that the government might have possibly messed up enough to warrant a new trial. But still.
As part of a unusual deal brokered between his defense team and chagrined US attorneys, Eric McDavid, who in 2007 was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison on domestic terrorism charges, walked free on January 8 after the government told a judge it had “inadvertently” failed to hand over thousands of pages of FBI documents to his defense counsel in his original trial.
McDavid, 37, served three days short of nine years in custody before US District Judge Morrison England agreed to reduce his sentence to a lone count of conspiracy and released him on time served.
“This is one of the most unusual things I’ve had to deal with, if not the most unusual, since I started on the bench in 1996 and on this court since 2002,” England said, according to court transcripts. “I’ve never heard or seen of anything like this.”
As part of his deal, McDavid waived his right to sue the government. He is now a free man, but the conclusion of his case is an embarrassing coda to the Bush-era surveillance of radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists in the years following the 9/11 attacks.
McDavid and two other radical environmentalists, Zach Jenson and Lauren Weiner, were convicted in 2007 of conspiring to blow up a dam, cellphone towers, and a US Forest Service lab after a paid FBI informant—an unassuming 18-year-old known only as “Anna”—infiltrated their group, egged them on, and exposed them.
That would have likely been the end of McDavid’s story, but a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by two of his supporters dredged up nearly 2,500 pages of FBI documents that prosecutors had previously insisted did not exist.
The tranche of files led the US attorneys office in Sacramento to turn over even more documents that it had—according to a letter to McDavid’s lawyers—”inadvertently not disclosed during discovery.” Among the documents were flirty notes between McDavid and Anna, as well as a request from an FBI agent for a polygraph exam on Anna to test the veracity of her statements. All of which McDavid’s attorneys say would have been crucial in bolstering McDavid’s entrapment defense.
“It’s somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence.”
“[Anna] fomented the alleged conspiracy, literally herding defendants together from around the country for meetings, badgering them to form a plan, and mocking and berating them when they showed disinterest,” McDavid’s lawyers Ben Rosenfeld and Mark Vermeulen wrote in a motion last year.
The Sacramento Bee described England, who presided over McDavid’s original ten-day trial, as “clearly exasperated” and “sometimes stopping to hold his head in his left hand” during last month’s hearing.
“I know he’s not necessarily a choirboy, but he doesn’t deserve to go through this, either,” England said. “It’s not fair.”
Prosecutors and top brass from the US Attorney’s office, none of whom were involved in the original trial, had little to offer for explanation.
“We don’t know exactly why they weren’t turned over,” John Vincent, chief of the US Attorney’s criminal division, told England. According to the US Attorney’s office, the documents were sitting in an FBI file in Sacramento.
In a statement released following the hearing, the US Attorney’s Office of Eastern California said that “although those documents do not directly bear upon whether the defendant committed the underlying acts… the United States agreed that it is conceivable that a court could conclude that the failure to produce them required a retrial.”
This is a master class in ass-covering, impressive even by government standards. Note how it starts by reaffirming McDavid’s guilt, and then avoids admitting any wrongdoing by saying that the government agreed, in its great magnanimity, that others might come to the conclusion that it had seriously screwed the pooch
Some prosecutors were a bit more forthright.
“We absolutely admit that we made a mistake, but there was no deliberate, knowing withholding of any documents,” said First Assistant US Attorney Philip A. Ferrari in January.
But the notion that the FBI and prosecutors simply misplaced thousands of pages of documents from a highly touted anti-terror investigation and then rediscovered them years later is hard to swallow for many who watched McDavid’s case unfold.
“It’s somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence,” McDavid’s lawyer Rosenfeld said in a phone interview. “The point is that only the government can explain what level of mistake this was, and the public should demand that explanation.”
In an interview, Will Potter, an independent journalist who has written extensively about the government’s surveillance of radical environmental groups, called the government’s claim that it accidentally failed to hand over the documents “complete nonsense.”
“The FBI and prosecutors have been intimately aware of how many boundaries have been pushed and crossed along the way, and they’ve relentlessly defended it,” Potter said. “Jurors came afterward and said they thought they were misled. In recordings, the court heard [Anna] constantly berating McDavid for not taking action. Every step of the way the government pushed and pushed to get the conviction at any cost.”
The Green Scare
McDavid first met Anna in 2004 at an invitation-only anarchist gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a heady time for both radical leftists and federal law enforcement, which had been given broad discretion and nearly unlimited resources to root out terrorism threats. Love was in the air.
McDavid, 26 at the time, was an on-again, off-again college student from Auburn, California, with a muddled interest in anarchism and environmentalism.
Anna was a no-nonsense girl with pink hair, a short camo skirt, and a keffiyeh around her neck. She told McDavid she had hitchhiked to the gathering. In reality, she had flown out on the FBI’s dime.
She had gotten a taste for informant work after infiltrating an anti-globalization protest group for a paper for her community college class. Impressed by her initiative, a police officer in her class put her in touch with the Miami Police Department, which in turn referred her to the FBI. In a flattering 2008 profile in Elle magazine, Anna said she was a patriotic hawk who wanted to do something for her country after 9/11.
She was a godsend for the FBI. Radicals seemed to be able to sniff out professional undercover officers before they even stepped through the door. But Anna was a natural—quick-thinking, reliable, and able to move through activist circles with ease. She didn’t walk like a cop or otherwise exude cop-ness.
McDavid didn’t know it when he first laid his smitten eyes on Anna in Iowa, but he had just been snared in what activists would later dub the “green scare,” an allusion to the anti-communist red scare of the 1950s.
“The only reason they got on the radar was because they had a political viewpoint,” Mark Reichel, McDavid’s lawyer at his original trial, said in an interview. “At the same time, the head of the Justice Department was testifying before Congress, saying, ‘No, we don’t do that. We don’t spy on people because of political reasons.'”
Indeed, here’s former FBI director Robert Mueller speaking at a press conference announcing the 2006 indictment of 11 “eco-terrorists” responsible for an estimated $80 million in property damages: “The FBI becomes involved, as it did in this case, only when volatile talk crosses the line into violence and criminal activity.”
This is a key point in McDavid’s entrapment defense. Contrary to Mueller’s reassurances, McDavid and Jenson’s rhetoric when Anna first met them in ’04 was about as violent as the average Rage Against the Machine album.
Anna caught up with McDavid again in ’05 in Philadelphia, where he was staying with two friends, Jenson and Weiner. Anna reported back to the FBI that McDavid had become thoroughly radicalized since their first meeting.
Anna’s FBI handlers put her on McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner full-time and outfitted her with the finest in spy gear: a bugged ’96 Chevy Lumina that she used to drive the group around. The FBI also provided Anna with a small cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was to act as the quartet’s base of operations. She paid for groceries and even doled out spending money to the group, sometimes in $100 bills. She wasn’t old enough to buy beer yet, but Anna was passing along fake bomb recipes from the FBI to the trio.
Anna’s recordings of late-night bull sessions showed the trio talking about bombing targets like cell phone towers and fish hatcheries. Later in court, the three activists would try to play off the conversations as purely hypothetical, the musings of some stoned anarchists with delusions of grandeur.
“Anarchists usually just talk shit,” Jenson said in a 2012 Outside story on the case, “but they never really do that much.”
In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists.
But one day, the group drove to a Kmart in Auburn to pick up ingredients for a bomb test. McDavid was sitting on the back of Anna’s car in the parking lot, waiting for Jenson and Weiner to return, when he heard the automatic locks on the car doors click shut. He looked in. Anna was on her cell phone. Moments later, black SUVs screeched into the parking lot, and he was surrounded by heavily armed agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In an interview with Democracy Now!—his first after being released from prison—McDavid said that that was the moment he realized Anna was a snitch.
McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner were charged with conspiracy based on their recorded conversations, their purchase of a book that included bomb-making instructions, their scouting of potential targets, and their purchase of bomb-making materials at Kmart.
For the government’s prosecution of radical environmentalists, Potter said that the McDavid case “represented a turning point in a couple of ways.
“Around September 11, the actions by the radical environmental movement had really subsided significantly,” Potter said. “There were not a lot of crimes by the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front. There were very heavy prosecutions of a few cases, but the climate as a whole, there wasn’t a lot happening. The McDavid case represented a shift. They manufactured terrorism plots, and that’s precisely what McDavid’s case was all about.”
The Trial
In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists. US Attorney McGregor Scott claimed the group’s plot to bomb the Nimbus dam, had it not been thwarted by Anna, would have made “what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday pancake breakfast.” (A spokesman for the dam later said that blowing up the gates would just cause water to “trickle” down the American and Sacramento rivers.)
Anna testified that she woke up in the cabin one night with McDavid looming above her holding an eight-inch hunting knife. Meanwhile, Jenson and Weiner both flipped and agreed to testify against McDavid in return for lighter sentences. Years later, Jenson would provide McDavid’s lawyer with a sworn declaration saying he was pressured to contort his testimony to agree with the government’s version of events.
“I became very aware that if I did not testify to the facts that the government felt occurred, which I did not believe occurred, that my plea bargain would be taken away and I would be charged with the major federal charge and would very likely receive a 20-year sentence,” Jenson said. “This was a lot of pressure for me to handle.”
The jury also received confusing, sometimes contradictory instructions. They were told entrapment required a government “agent,” and Judge England told the jurors from the bench that Anna was an agent, but then later sent a written note to the jury that she was not one.
The jury was also told, when considering McDavid’s predisposition for violence, to limit the timeframe to June 2005 and onward, not from when Anna first began reporting on him in 2004.
Of the 12 jurors, ten would later go on the record to various publications expressing serious doubts about the government’s case against McDavid. “I hope he gets a new trial,” Diane Bennett, one of the jurors, told Elle in 2008. “I’m not happy with the one he got.”
England sentenced McDavid to 235 months in prison on an enhanced terrorism charge. He spent the first 28 months of his sentence in solitary confinement. Jenson and Weiner served six months and two weeks in prison, respectively. Anna consulted for the FBI for a bit longer before giving up the spy game and trying to move on with her life.
But perhaps more interesting than the vagaries of the case is what never made it to the jury’s ears. During the trial, Reichel filed dozens of motions to suppress, dismiss, and otherwise muck up the government’s case against McDavid. Among those were numerous motions for discovery for the FBI files on McDavid and Anna.
“The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, ‘God, is this even going to work?'”
“The FBI filed responses in writing saying none of this stuff exists. No cell phone records, no polygraphs, no internal FBI reports, no letters,” Reichel said. “So I did a FOIA and it came back with not much, maybe 20 pages, items of discovery I already had.”
Reichel also filed a motion to dismiss the case based on McDavid’s infatuation with Anna. The prosecution’s response to Reichel’s motion: “The defendant’s claim of a romantic relationship between him and the informant is categorically untrue.”
“I Think You and I Could Be Great”
McDavid lost an appeal before the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. He would have languished in prison for the rest of his long sentence had it not been for the dogged work of two of his supporters, Jenny Esquivel and Evan Tucker.
Tucker, now living in Spain, had started a group called Sacramento Prisoner Support in 2004 to help activists who had been targeted by the federal government. In 2008, Esquivel and Tucker filed a FOIA request for McDavid’s FBI file.
“Jenny and I always felt that the government was hiding evidence from the defense,” Tucker said. “How could a person who was investigated by the FBI for one and a half years and then convicted of a federal crime not have an FBI file? So we decided to do our own request. Originally they told us there was nothing, but we kept pushing and finally, one day, several thousand pages of documents showed up in our PO box.”
Tucker says the FOIA sleuthing revealed the FBI was also interested in him.
“They interviewed people about me, sat outside my house, and followed me around,” Tucker said. “They sent informants to our fundraisers and had them report back on me as well. There is a lot I still don’t know about the investigation because they would only give me half my file and even that was heavily redacted.”
With a batch of fresh evidence in hand, McDavid’s lawyers filed a writ for habeas corpus in 2010. The government continued to fight the appeal, but in November 2014 it handed over even more files that should have been given to McDavid’s defense counsel in his original trial. The new documents included mushy notes from McDavid professing his interest in Anna, as well as never-before-seen responses from Anna leading him on.
In a 2005 email six months before McDavid’s arrest, Anna wrote, “I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out. I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”
McDavid replied three days later in his idiosyncratic syntax: “hey cheeka, so far as us B’n great, that i think is an understatement… along w/the ‘LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out’… but if u aint learning, u aint live’n… & I do think we could learn a lot from each other.”
It’s fair to say they learned a lot from each other, although Anna and McDavid both clarified that their relationship was never physical. For the most part, it seemed one-sided, with Anna brushing McDavid off and telling him to wait until after their “mission.”
The US Attorney’s Office also handed over a request for a polygraph test on Anna. The request form said the polygraph was to “confirm veracity of [Anna’s] reporting prior to the expenditure of substantial efforts and money based on source’s reporting.”
But the polygraph test never took place. No documents provided by the FBI or the US Attorney’s Office explain why, and the name of the US prosecutor who signed off on the polygraph request was redacted for “privacy” reasons.
I asked Reichel if he was surprised at the contents of the documents, considering the FBI had insisted they didn’t exist. He replied with the typical bravado of a criminal defense attorney who’s been proven right.
“You remember that Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent, where he would hold the letter up to his head and predict what was inside?” Reichel said. “I knew exactly what was in those documents.”
But McDavid’s release was far from certain. Even after securing a deal with the US attorneys office, no one was sure how Judge England, who had previously thrown the book at McDavid, would react to such a bizarre request.
“The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, ‘God is this even going to work?'” Esquivel said in an interview. “It was nine years of struggle and fighting and hoping against hope. A lot of hard work and luck came together.”
There are lingering questions surrounding McDavid’s case. According to Esquivel, the FBI is still withholding 900 pages of documents. And although McDavid cannot sue under the terms of his plea agreement to a single conspiracy charge, a lawyer for Weiner told the Guardian she is considering suing to get her own conviction lifted.
There is also the case of Steve Lapham, the assistant US attorney in McDavid’s case. Lapham fought McDavid’s Habeas appeal tooth and nail.
“The government concedes that a relatively small amount of information pertaining to the case was apparently not disclosed to the defense,” Lapham wrote in response to the appeal. “However, the omitted material was either inculpatory or benign. None of the omitted material was exculpatory.”
It was only after Lapham departed the US Attorney’s Office, according to Tucker, that the government showed any interest in releasing the withheld documents. Lapham is now a judge for the Sacramento County Superior Court.
February 27, 2015
by CJ Ciaramella
Find this story at 27 February 2015
Copyright Vice.com
Elle Anna Informant Green Scare Eco-terrorism McDavid
The May issue of Elle has an article on how the FBI paid a young woman, known as “Anna,” to befriend activists and pressure them into illegal activity. Now, some of those she befriended and entrapped, including environmentalist Eric McDavid, are going to prison as terrorists.
“For two years now, a young woman in camo pants, black sweatshirt, military boots and pink hair, known to both her fellow eco-activists and FBI employers as ‘Anna,’ had been crashing the party.”
Unfortunately Andrea Todd’s article misses the big picture—questioning the relentless push to label non-violent activists as “terrorists,” and the sleazy methods used to do that– for the sake of glamming up an interesting spy story.
She falls head-over-heels for the sexiness of the story—shadowy activists in love out to save the world—and swallows a series of absurdities provided by the FBI. Rather than pick apart every paragraph, I wanted to highlight a few good points buried within the sensationalism:
Eric McDavid, Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson are accused of plotting to sabotage a U.S. Forest Service genetics tree lab and the Nimbus Dam. U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott has claimed that damage to the dam would have made “what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday pancake breakfast.” Todd reports that Jeff McCracken, a spokesperson for the dam, says the water would just “trickle.” (p. 323)This is an important point when we’re talking about labeling people as “terrorists” who endangered human life. It’s a good example of how the government has consistently twisted the truth in the hopes of chalking up a victory in the “War on Terrorism.”
The FBI supplied Anna with a ’96 Chevy Lumina, and gas money, and food money, to drive Jenson and Weiner across the country and meet McDavid. There, the FBI paid for a cabin. And on top of that, the FBI supplied bomb-making recipes and materials.All that was needed was a little encouragement. And the FBI supplied that, too.
At one point when tensions were very high, McDavid tried to calm Anna and Weiner down, saying “relax and chill out and maybe come back and chitchat later.” Weiner agreed, offering to make pasta. Anna flipped out.
Anna: Tomorrow, what are we planning on doing tomorrow? Are we still planning on doing anything tomorrow? Or should I just stop talking about plans?
McDavid: Hmmm.
Weiner: I would love it if you stopped talking.
Anna: I would love it if you guys followed a plan! How about that! (p. 324)
This is a critical exchange, because Jenson’s attorneys argued that his client was “entrapped.” In other words, the three were not likely going to commit these crimes, and Anna was trying to push them down that path, in the hopes of getting a big gold star from the FBI.
“Under cross-examination by Reichel [Jenson’s attorney], Torres [FBI] admitted he hadn’t read all of the literature on informants; nor could he recall any specifics about the Attorney General’s guidelines regarding political protests.” (p. 324)Anna infiltrated lawful gatherings, like a CrimethInc convergence and G8 protests. Todd says that they were secretive and require a special eco-terrorist invitation. In reality, they’re posted widely on the Internet. The danger of tactics like this, beyond ruining the lives of those entrapped and watering down public faith in the criminal justice system, is that basic First Amendment rights are a casualty as well.
During Jenson’s trial, prosecutors went to great lengths to conceal Anna’s identity, even from the attorneys. Part of the justification was that Anna could be a target for retaliation, retaliation by environmentalists who have yet to harm anyone. If environmentalists are such a threat, why is Anna posing glamour-shot-style in the world’s largest fashion magazine?
Perhaps the most disturbing piece in all of this is the final section of the article, where Todd interviewed one of the jurors, Diane Bennett.“I said the FBI was an embarrassment,” she says, as other jurors scrambled to unload similar opinions. “I hope he gets a new trial. I’m not happy with the one he got.”
Bennett said that the foreman “teared up” when he delivered the guilty verdict. But the judge’s instructions were confusing, she said, and “people were tired… we wanted to go home.”
The piece could have been much worse. As someone posted anonymously on Indymedia in Portland: “Perhaps Andrea Todd deserves a little credit. She was, after all, attempting to write an article about someone who lies for a living.”
In light of that, has Elle issued a retraction? These stickers have mysteriously appeared in copies of the magazine on newsstands around the country.
They read, in part:
Following consultation with federal agencies, we at Elle wish to retract this article. Not because of the stream of factual inaccuracies beginning in the second sentence (there has never been a CrimethInc. convergence in Athens, Georgia), but because in the current political climate it is irresponsible to even pretend to give a fair hearing to radical anti-capitalists. Even if Anna’s story is a cut-and-dried case of entrapment, we have to understand this as a necessary defense of our free market freedoms.
by WILL POTTER on MAY 2, 2008
Copyright greenisthenewred.com
WASHINGTON — Was Tim Franzen stockpiling weapons? What was Tim Franzen’s philosophy? What was his political affiliation? Did Tim Franzen ever talk about violent revolution?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to know. In late 2011, an agent or agents — Franzen still isn’t quite sure — began trying to find out. It was during this time that Franzen became a well-known and central presence in Occupy Atlanta. He helped start the Occupy Wall Street offshoot, and had been arrested when police razed their encampment in a downtown Atlanta park.
After the first police sweep of the park, Franzen told The Huffington Post that the FBI began interviewing his fellow Occupy Atlanta activists about whether Franzen might have a cache of weapons for a future violent revolution. He said the feds interviewed three different activists at their homes about his activities and beliefs.
“It definitely rattled my cage to have these kids getting knocks on their door,” Franzen said.
Here’s what the feds would have found out in the course of a background check on the activist: Franzen had a criminal record related to teenage drug use and robberies that supported his habit. But he last spent time in prison when he was 19. Franzen, now 35, went on to found a chain of halfway houses to help people make the transition from addiction to recovery. He later became a community organizer with the Quaker social justice organization American Friends Service Committee, a position he continues to hold while working within Occupy Atlanta.
During one interview, an FBI agent gave one of Franzen’s fellow activists a business card, which was handed over to Franzen, who decided to call the agent and have a little fun.
“I have an expert on all things Tim Franzen,” Franzen remembers telling the agent over the phone. “I said, ‘I’m Tim Franzen.’ … He was sort of dumbfounded. He didn’t know what to say.”
Franzen chastised the federal agent for scaring his younger activist friends. “At first he started denying it,” he said. “He tried to write it off as not a big deal, as sort of protocol.”
At the end of December, the FBI released internal documents that revealed a coordinated — if quixotic — surveillance of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just about every law enforcement agency gets a cameo in the correspondence: Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, an entity known as the Domestic Security Alliance Council — and even the Federal Reserve. But the extremely limited disclosure makes it difficult to assess exactly with whom the government agencies were coordinating, or why. Was the FBI attempting to infiltrate and undermine the Occupy movement, or simply trying to keep tabs on protesters who were hoping to spark political change?
Of the 110 pages released — first obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request — dozens are heavily redacted. The documents state that 287 additional pages on the FBI’s Occupy activities were “deleted” from the release by the agency for various reasons, including nine labeled “outside the scope” and 14 tagged “duplicate.”
At times, the documents are contradictory and show FBI agents spreading false information. The earliest memo erroneously describes Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that came up with the idea behind Occupy, as a “self-identified American revolutionary anarchist group.” In another, OWS is lumped in with the “Aryan Nations (sic)” and hacker-activists Anonymous as “domestic terrorists.”
In response to a request for comment, FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen replied via email, “The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents.” He continued, “While the FBI is obligated to thoroughly investigate any serious allegations involving threats of violence, we do not open investigations based solely on 1st Amendment activity. In fact, DOJ and the FBI’s own internal guidelines on domestic operations strictly forbid that.”
If there was a unified mission behind the Occupy surveillance, it appears the purpose was to pass information about activists’ plans to the finance industry. In one memo from August 2011, the FBI discusses informing officials at the New York Stock Exchange about “the planned Anarchist protest titled ‘occupy Wall Street’, scheduled for September 17, 2011.[sic] Numerous incidents have occurred in the past which show attempts by Anarchist groups to disrupt, influence, and or shut down normal business operations of financial districts.”
The documents reveal that the FBI met with officials from four banks and one credit union, and spoke over the phone with a representative from a fifth bank. The FBI also talked with officials from the Richmond Federal Reserve, a branch of the central bank that covers much of the American South. If the FBI communicated with any of the trillion-dollar banks that were the primary subject of Occupy Wall Street’s economic critique, however, those discussions have been redacted from the documents.
Citigroup, for example, is not mentioned anywhere the documents, while Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are each mentioned once in passing. No documents show coordination between the FBI and any of those banks — although it would be conspicuous for the FBI to have communicated with smaller banks that were not a major focus of the Occupy movement while ignoring the much larger institutions that were recipients of the 2008-2009 bailouts.
The few direct communications with banks that are detailed in the documents reveal little evidence of improper behavior. On Oct. 6, 2011, the FBI called Zions Bank to inform the bankers that “Anonymous hactivists” had distributed the personal phone numbers of “the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase” online, implying that Zions executives might also be subject to such treatment per an impending Occupy rally in Salt Lake City, where Zions is headquartered. Zions declined to comment on the call for this article, but the bank — which has about 2 percent of the total assets of JPMorgan — has not been a target of Occupy rhetoric before or since the FBI call.
The only other banks named in the FBI documents are Hancock Bank, Peoples Bank, Bancorp South and Regions Bank — all of which declined to comment for this article. The FBI attended a Nov. 16, 2011, meeting of officials from those banks in Biloxi, Miss., where someone from Hancock Bank warned attendees to expect an Occupy protest on Dec. 7 that could include a “sit-in” or efforts to “lock the bank doors.”
None of the banks mentioned in the FBI file would comment on whether the FBI met regularly with bank officials. Bank robbery is a federal crime, which gives FBI jurisdiction.
All of these banks would have been small-ball for a protest movement that targeted massive income inequality and outrageous executive pay. But if the FBI was issuing warnings to and meeting on security issues with these smaller banks, they were almost certainly having talks with bigger New York banks — meaning the portrait of the FBI’s activities around Occupy, insofar as the internal documents are concerned, is likely incomplete in a significant dimension.
Recent FBI investigations have at times put big banks in a negative light, but have yet to result in major actions against financial institutions. In July 2012, an FBI probe found that Bank of America had allowed a Mexican drug cartel to launder money through the bank. While BofA has yet to face any fines for the episode, the head of the FBI in Charlotte, N.C., BofA’s headquarters, recently left the law enforcement agency for a job at Bank of America.
While the FBI communicated with the financial sector about Occupy, it’s unclear the degree to which they engaged with actual Occupy activists like Franzen.
Kevin Zeese was one of the founding organizers of Occupy Washington, D.C., which set up camp just blocks from FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice. Zeese told HuffPost that infiltration by law enforcement agents or informants was an issue, but whether much of it was just shadowy conspiracy or serious agitating remains a mystery.
In one exchange he had with a Homeland Security officer, Zeese said the agent knew a key detail about a scheduled protest at the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeese joked that the officer knew more than he did about what was going on.
Zeese did remember one FBI agent who would bike over to the camp. Some of the younger activists talked regularly with the agent. “He was open about it,” Zeese said. “He would ride through on a bike with the FBI thing on his back.” The agent ended up spending a weekend at the camp and even donating funds to help pay for security.
Whether law enforcement had a hand in breaking up camps, Zeese said, “I can’t tell.” To which he added, “Down the road, there may be proof.”
Franzen suggests that federal agents conducted more clandestine activities than simple Internet searches and protest monitoring. Occupiers frequently complained that the more outspoken activists within their ranks appeared to be targeted by police for arrest. Franzen said there is a connection between the agent who inquired about him among his friends and his subsequent arrest at a protest. He chronicled the incident on his blog a year ago:
Before the police officers warned the crowd to disperse from the street I had already gotten onto the side walk. One of the police Lieutenants yelled to his officers, ‘Get him’ and pointed at me. The police had to worm their way through the crowd in order to grab me and drag me into the street.
When I was dragged into the street, I asked the lieutenant what he was doing and he said, ‘arresting you.’
‘For what,’ I asked.
‘For being in the street,’ he said.
‘But I was on the sidewalk,’ I replied.
‘You’re not now,’ he said with a smile.
Jason Cherkis
Zach Carter
Posted: 01/05/2013 7:42 am EST Updated: 01/23/2014 6:58 pm EST
Find this story at 23 January 2013
Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
Newly revealed documents show how police partnered with corporations to monitor the Occupy Wall Street movement. DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy have obtained thousands of pages of records from counterterrorism and law enforcement agencies that detail how so-called fusions centers monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. These fusion centers are comprised of employees from municipal, county and federal counterterrorism and homeland security entities, as well as local police departments, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
Click here to see our extensive coverage of the police crackdown of the Occupy movement.
Read full report on government surveillance of Occupy movement by the Center for Media and Democracy / DBA Press.
TRANSCRIPT:
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, it’s great to have you with us, editor of The Progressive magazine. And he did this very interesting story, a cover story for June issue of the magazine, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.” Can you compare what you have found—and start off by saying why Phoenix. Why did you focus on Phoenix?
MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, I focused on Phoenix because the primary researcher for this story, Beau Hodai of DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, had compiled tremendous amounts of information. He had issued Freedom of Information Act requests from the Phoenix Police Department, from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. And so, he got thousands, literally thousands, of pages of information, primarily about Phoenix and Arizona, but also some national context. But I thought by focusing on this one city, you could really tell, at the most granular level, how police officers and Homeland Security are really going after left-wing activists. And I thought it was important to really focus in narrowly, because I think those narrow details really give a clearer picture of just how hand-in-glove local law enforcement is with the private sector in going after these Occupy protesters.
AMY GOODMAN: How does this compare to the IRS monitoring tea party groups or, you know, sort of specially targeting them for deciding whether they should get nonprofit status?
MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, I thought it was outrageous what the IRS was doing in that Cincinnati office. But this, to me, is much worse because, whereas the IRS office in Cincinnati, that may have been, you know, a bureaucratic mistake or bungling or lack of supervision, what’s going on with the spying on Occupy activists was a systematic effort by police departments, not just in Phoenix, but around the country, with Homeland Security, to track the Occupy activists—and to coordinate a response, even. One of the documents that Beau Hodai released, from the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press, was a file—a report on a teleconference that 13 police departments around the country had as to how to respond to Occupy, what they called “growing concerns” about the burgeoning Occupy movement, and that they needed to coordinate an effective response. And so, you know, when we had that crackdown on Occupy simultaneously over a weekend in many different cities, I wondered at the time whether there wasn’t coordination going on between the police departments to crush the Occupy movement. And this suggests that there was.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Matt Rothschild, you also speak specifically about the way in which protests against the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, occurred. Could you elaborate on that and why that was a particular focus of law enforcement?
MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, there’s documents, again, that show that police, from the U.S. Capitol Police all the way to the Phoenix Police Department, were monitoring protests of the National Defense Authorization Act. The National Defense Authorization Act allows the president of the United States to grab any single one of us and throw us into jail and deny us due process and access to a judge for as long as the president says so. And so, this is a huge clampdown on our civil liberties, and people should be protesting it. And it’s ironic that people trying to defend their civil liberties are having their civil liberties violated at the same time.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, explain what these fusion centers are and how they work, both with public law enforcement and with private companies.
MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, this is a real problem I have with fusion centers, Amy. Fusion centers are—in each state, there’s a fusion center. And the fusion center is supposed to represent law enforcement at every level, from, you know, campus police to city police, to sheriffs, to the FBI and state police. But also, within these fusion centers, there are representatives of the private sector. And there’s also an organization called InfraGard in these fusion centers. Now, InfraGard is an association of more than 50,000 business people with the FBI. They’re essentially FBI minders, with these business people in each state. And sometimes these business people get information from the FBI even before elected officials get it. And also, the FBI tells these business members of InfraGard, “Hey, if you ever have a problem with an employee, just let us know.” And so, you know, is this the kind of collaboration we want? That a boss, who doesn’t like what you’re doing on the workplace—maybe you’re forming a union, the boss calls the FBI, and then what? The FBI opens a file on you? We need to be careful of this institution called InfraGard, too, which was part of the Arizona fusion center, by the way.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt, we want to thank you for being with us. Matt Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine, wrote the cover story for the June issue of the magazine, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.” The piece draws heavily on documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press. Matt Rothschild is also author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2013
Watch Part One of our interview with Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive
Find this story at 22 May 2013
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Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a nationwide “counter terrorism” apparatus emerged. And it has turned on dissenters like the Occupy movement.
The following is the first in a series of articles extracted from a new report by CMD and DBA Press entitled “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”
Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a nationwide “counter terrorism” apparatus emerged. Components of this apparatus include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (U.S. DHS), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), ODNI’s “National Counterterrorism Center” (NCTC), and state/regional “fusion centers.”
“Fusion centers,” by and large, are staffed with personnel working in “counter terrorism”/ “homeland security” units of municipal, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement/”public safety”/”counter terrorism” agencies. To a large degree, the “counter terrorism” operations of municipal, county, state and tribal agencies engaged in “fusion centers” are financed through a number of U.S. DHS grant programs.
Initially, “fusion centers” were intended to be intelligence sharing partnerships between municipal, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement/”counter terrorism” agencies, dedicated solely to the dissemination/sharing of “terrorism”-related intelligence. However, shortly following the creation of “fusion centers,” their focus shifted from this exclusive interest in “terrorism,” to one of “all hazards” — an umbrella term used to describe virtually anything (including “terrorism”) that may be deemed a “hazard” to the public, or to certain private sector interests. And, as has been mandated through a series of federal legislative actions and presidential executive orders, “fusion centers” (and the “counter terrorism” entities that they are comprised of) work — in ever closer proximity — with private corporations, with the stated aim of protecting items deemed to be “critical infrastructure/key resources” (CI/KR, typically thought of as items such as power plants, dams or weapons manufacturing plants).
As detailed in a report from DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy (DBA/CMD), “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” through 2011 and 2012, “fusion centers” and other “counter terrorism” agencies engaged in widespread monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists.
Records obtained by DBA/CMD indicate that, in some instances, these “counter terrorism” agencies worked in partnership with corporate interests to gather and disseminate intelligence relating to the activities of citizens engaged in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Ironically, records indicate that corporate entities engaged in such public-private intelligence sharing partnerships were often the very same corporate entities criticized, and protested against, by the Occupy Wall Street movement as having undue influence in the functions of public government.
This article examines the effects of such public-private intelligence sharing partnerships in Arizona, and how such partnerships benefited corporate interests that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest actions through 2011 and 2012.
Arizona Fusion Center Work on Behalf of Banks
In October of 2011, Jamie Dimon, president and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, had plans to travel to Phoenix for a “town hall” event with 2,000 of his employees at Chase Field (home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, located in downtown Phoenix). As Dimon is one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and the head of the largest bank in the country — a bank that played a key role in the collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008 — JP Morgan Chase Regional Security Manager Dan Grady contacted Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center personnel on October 17 (the day before Dimon’s scheduled visit), to ensure a smooth landing for Dimon in Phoenix.
The Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC), commonly known as the “Arizona Fusion Center,” is comprised of personnel from such entities as the Arizona Department of Public Safety Intelligence Bureau, the Phoenix Police Department Homeland Defense Bureau, the Tempe Police Department Homeland Defense Unit, the Mesa Police Department Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Unit, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI Phoenix Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Transportation Security Administration, and the U.S. DHS offices of Infrastructure Protection and Intelligence and Analysis.
Records indicate that Grady’s chief point of law enforcement/”counter terrorism” personnel contact in Phoenix — with whom he discussed the particulars of Dimon’s visit and shared a detailed itinerary — was Phoenix Police Department Homeland Defense Bureau (PPDHDB) Detective, and ACTIC Community Liaison Program Coordinator, Jennifer O’Neill. As records indicate, the chief area of discussion between Grady and O’Neill were concerns that citizens engaged in Occupy Phoenix, an Occupy Wall Street-inspired group that had launched only days prior, on October 14 and 15, might try to disrupt the event — or otherwise inconvenience Dimon.
According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, in response to Grady’s concerns, O’Neill stated that she and a PPDHDB “CI/KR security specialist” colleague had engaged in the monitoring of known online “social networking” outlets used by Occupy Phoenix for discussion relating to the Dimon visit. As such O’Neill stated: “we have not seen anything on social networking that leads us to believe protestors are aware of this event.”
By no stretch of the imagination was this monitoring of social media (known in the world of “counter terrorism” agencies as the acquisition of “open source intelligence”) for the benefit of JP Morgan Chase President and CEO Dimon the full extent of such activity conducted by ACTIC personnel. Records indicate that ACTIC personnel consistently gathered “open source,” and other, intelligence relating to Occupy Phoenix protests of corporate entities throughout 2011 and 2012. According to these records, in many instances ACTIC personnel would share this intelligence with personnel employed by corporations who were subject to these protests.
Another example of Occupy Phoenix-related ACTIC CLP work for the benefit of banks would be intelligence gathering and other monitoring conducted in preparation for “Bank Transfer Day,” November 5, 2011 — a day on which Occupy Wall Street groups nationwide, along with other mainstream activist/consumer advocate groups, encouraged citizens to discontinue business with the nation’s leading banks (such as J.P. Morgan Chase banks, Bank of America and Wells Fargo), in favor of credit unions and smaller community-based banks.
Records obtained by DBA/CMD show that, on November 3, Mesa Police Department (Mesa is a Phoenix suburb) Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Unit Detective/ACTIC Terrorism Liaison Officer (TLO) Christopher Adamczyk, issued an OWS-related bulletin to a number of ACTIC TLOs/analysts. While the actual Adamczyk bulletin is absent from records delivered to DBA/CMD by PPDHDB, records indicate that the subject of this Adamczyk bulletin was the impending November 5 “Bank Transfer Day.” It is important to note, however, that available records indicate that the Mesa TLO did not address “Bank Transfer Day” events set to take place in the Phoenix area.
Records show that, after receiving this bulletin, O’Neill contacted PPDHDB/ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Brenda Dowhan and asked if there was any specific information she could pass on to downtown Phoenix banks.
In response to O’Neill’s request, Dowhan indicated that she would try to find “FOUO” (“For Official Use Only”) information that could be released to downtown Phoenix banks. In addition, she offered:
“Occupy Phoenix just updated their [Facebook] page saying that they will be marching to Wells Fargo, B of A [Bank of America], and Chase Tower. They are supposed to do a ‘credit card shredding ceremony’ , but eh haven’t identified which bank they will be doing that at [sic]. We will have to monitor their FB [Facebook].”
As previously stated, O’Neill is the coordinator of the ACTIC Community Liaison Program (CLP). ACTIC CLP was created in 2006, in response to federal mandates calling for greater involvement of private sector corporations in the national “counter terrorism” “information sharing environment” (ISE, as created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. This piece of federal legislation also created ODNI, NCTC and set the groundwork for the national spread of “fusion centers,” per the implementation of ISE).
ACTIC CLP is intended to facilitate the flow of “counter terrorism” information/intelligence between private sector corporate partners and the Arizona “fusion center.” While the stated purpose of ACTIC CLP is to prevent terrorist activity, to identify terrorist threats, protect CI/KR, and “create an awareness of localized security issues, challenges, and business interdependencies,” records indicate that, during the course of 2011 and 2012, ACTIC CLP was used as an advance warning system to alert member corporations and banks of impending Occupy Phoenix protests.
ACTIC CLP is one of two primary vehicles through which corporate interests partner with ACTIC, the other vehicle being Arizona Infragard. Arizona Infragard is the Arizona chapter of Infragard, a public-private intelligence sharing partnership administered by the FBI and supported (both financially and through the delivery of intelligence) by U.S. DHS.
The Creepy Guy Cometh: Undercover Cop Goes to the Vegan Coffee Shop
Records indicate that these advance warnings concerning the planned actions of Occupy Phoenix, and other instances of intelligence sharing with private sector partners (including meetings between law enforcement/”counter terrorism” personnel and area bankers), were derived from the constant monitoring of Occupy Phoenix — and other activist groups — by Phoenix area law enforcement personnel, most of whom were “terrorism liaison officers” active in the ACTIC TLO Program.
While much of this TLO-gathered information came in the form of “open source intelligence” derived from the monitoring of social media, one source of intelligence that records show greatly benefitted not only ACTIC “counter terrorism” personnel, but also ACTIC’s private sector partners, was an undercover Phoenix Police Department Major Offenders Bureau (PPDMOB) detective who had infiltrated the Phoenix activist community and who had attended some of the earliest Occupy Phoenix planning meetings, as well as subsequent meetings throughout October and November, 2011.
This infiltrating undercover officer presented himself as a homeless Mexican national named “Saul DeLara” (Saul). One example of this undercover officer’s work product is as follows: following a request by Phoenix Police Department Community Relations Bureau (PPDCRB, the departmental entity that served as the public face of PPD interaction with Occupy Phoenix — known, affectionately, by members of the Phoenix activist community as the “Red Squad”) Sgt. Mark Schweikert, PPDMOB Career Criminal Squad Sgt. Tom Van Dorn dispatched Saul to attend an early Occupy Phoenix planning meeting held on October 2, 2011 at a local coffee shop. Following the meeting, Saul delivered a detailed report, dutifully relaying all plans the activists had discussed, to his PPD superiors. And records indicate that Van Dorn recommended at this time that PPD units augment the intelligence stream provided by Saul with constant monitoring of the Occupy Phoenix Facebook page.
But, Saul’s attendance at and reporting on the October 2, 2011 Occupy Phoenix planning meeting was far from the extent of the undercover detective’s involvement in the world of Phoenix activism. For example, records indicate that Saul had embedded himself among Phoenix activists in Occupy Phoenix’s encampment at Cesar Chavez Plaza, in an attempt at providing further intelligence relating to activist “Bank Transfer Day” plans.
As stated in a November 3, 2011 email, PPDMOB Career Criminal Squad Sgt. Van Dorn informed PPDHDB commanding officers that, “Saul will be spending today and tomorrow hanging out in the Plaza and [sic] with the Anarchists to try and gather additional intelligence as we head into the weekend.”
Interestingly, Saul’s first appearance among Phoenix activists is said to significantly predate the birth of Occupy Phoenix (which officially launched over the course of a two day event, held October 14 and 15, 2011) and even the emergence of the national Occupy Wall Street movement (which materialized on September 17, 2011).
According to then-Phoenix activist Ian Fecke-Stoudt (Fecke-Stoudt has since moved out of the Phoenix area), Saul first appeared at Conspire, a now-defunct coffee house and vegan cafe located in downtown Phoenix, in July of 2011.
Poetically enough, Conspire was awarded the title of “Best Hangout for Anarchists, Revolutionaries and Dreamers” by the Phoenix New Times in 2010. The coffee house also served, later in 2011 and early 2012, as a regular meeting place for members of Occupy Phoenix.
According to Fecke-Stoudt, Saul’s appearance roughly coincided with the beginning of activist meetings, held at Conspire, dedicated to the planning of protest events associated with the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS), to be held at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in the upscale Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, from November 28 through December 2, 2011.
ALEC is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization that bills itself as the nation’s largest state “legislative membership organization.” As such, ALEC claims roughly 2,000, or approximately one third, of the nation’s state lawmakers as members. The organization couples these legislative members on a variety of “task forces” with representatives from the nation’s leading corporations, lobby and law firms, as well as private ’think tanks’ and ‘public policy foundations.’ These various “task forces” generate and adopt “model legislation,” which member lawmakers dutifully introduce and work to pass into law in their home assemblies.
Representatives of corporations and private foundations involved in ALEC are known as the organization’s “private sector members.” As is reflected by the organization’s tax filings, these private sector members fund most of ALEC’s activities. As such, ALEC is in reality the nation’s largest public-private legislative partnership, dedicated to advancing the legislative agenda of its corporate underwriters — though ALEC has steadfastly denied that any lobbying activity takes place at their events.
ALEC holds three primary events each year: the Spring Task Force Summit, the Annual Meeting and the States and Nation Policy Summit. Invariably, these events are held at upscale resorts in cites throughout the nation. Travel and boarding expenses for ALEC member lawmakers who attend these meetings are more often than not paid through the ALEC “scholarship fund,” a fund for which ALEC member lawmakers and ALEC member lobbyists raise (tax deductible) donations from other lobbyists/private sector donors.
The organization has come under fire in recent years for its involvement in disseminating various pieces of “model legislation” and policy initiatives — from “voter ID” laws, to laws aimed at crushing unions, as well as firearms-related laws (such as the “Stand Your Ground” law, which gained national attention following the February, 2012 shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin).
But, before the rise of public furor surrounding such pieces of “model legislation,” ALEC came under criticism for its involvement in disseminating the “No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act,” a piece of “model legislation” introduced to the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force (ALEC claims it disbanded this task force in April of 2012) by then-Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce during the ALEC December, 2009 SNPS (a month and a half prior to Pearce’s introduction of the same bill, SB 1070, in the Arizona legislature).
The crux of criticism relating to ALEC’s role in adopting and disseminating this piece of “model legislation” was the fact that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s premier operator of for-profit prisons and immigrant detention facilities, was a longstanding member — and corporate underwriter — of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force at the time of the “model legislation”’s adoption. Various records obtained by DBA/CMD show that the nation’s second largest private prison/immigrant detention center operator, Geo Group, was also active in ALEC during this time (Arizona lobby records indicate that Geo Group lobbyists were wining and dining lawmakers at the 2009 ALEC SNPS), along with the nation’s third largest private prison/immigration detention center operator, Management and Training Company (MTC, records obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy indicate that MTC was paying into the ALEC Arizona Scholarship Fund as late as August of 2010).
And so, when Phoenix-area activists learned of ALEC’s plans (Fecke-Stoudt estimates that Phoenix activists first learned of these plans in June of 2011) a coalition of activist groups — including prison reform activists, anarchists, immigrants’ rights groups and indigenous rights groups — began planning protest actions at Conspire.
According to Fecke-Stoudt, at some point in early to mid-July, 2011, his roommate — also a Phoenix-area activist — mentioned that “a creepy guy who looked like he was probably a cop” had been hanging around Conspire. According to Fecke-Stoudt, his roommate told him that the “creepy guy” had wandered into Conspire and struck up a conversation with her. The roommate said that, following this initial conversation, the man would appear at Conspire and seek her out — as if they were friends. According to Feck-Stoudt’s recollection of the roommate’s impression, the “creepy guy” had come off as being “overly interested in anarchism.”
It was not long after that Fecke-Stoudt was also approached by the “creepy guy” at Conspire. According to Fecke-Stoudt, the man wore a blue t-shirt and blue jeans, had slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair, appeared to be in his 50s, was very clean-cut and in good physical shape. The “creepy guy” introduced himself to Fecke-Stoudt and other Phoenix activists as “Saul DeLara.” Despite the man’s fit and clean appearance, Fecke-Stoudt said Saul claimed to be homeless — and commented frequently on trouble he had with police through the course of his life on the street. Saul claimed to be a native of Juarez, Mexico, but seldom disclosed any other details of his background or personal life.
It is worth noting that Saul would later offer one other interesting detail of his life. As reported by activists present at a November 9, 2011, ALEC protest planning meeting, Saul claimed to have ties to recent “anarchist” actions in Mexico. This appears to have been an oblique reference to a group calling themselves “Mexican Fire Cells Conspiracy/Informal Anarchist Federation,” which, through a number of anarchists online forums, had claimed responsibility for a fire at Las Torres Shopping Mall in Juarez on November 2.
According to Fecke Stoudt and other activists interviewed by DBA/CMD, Saul consistently expressed a voracious interest in all things related to anarchism. Perhaps the only area of conversation that stimulated Saul’s interest as much as general discussion of anarchism, said Fecke-Stoudt and other activists interviewed by DBA/CMD, was discussion of the pending ALEC SNPS protest.
According to Fecke-Stoudt, Saul commenced to appear at Conspire on nights when the Phoenix Anarchist Coalition (PAC) would hold meetings. It was during one of these occasions that Fecke-Stoudt detected a particularly odd pattern of behavior on Saul’s part.
“There’s a certain thing that people do, when you can tell they’re interested in something, but they’re trying not to talk about it — where, whenever they hear, like, even the slightest mention of that thing, they come running over and they start listening intently, or, like, they’ll just kind of slowly put themselves into the conversation — that’s what he did,” said Fecke-Stoudt.
This behavior on Saul’s part, explained Fecke-Stoudt, would occur whenever mention was made of the planned ALEC protest.
“Once, after a PAC meeting […] he was hanging about and somebody said something about ALEC and, you know, he just kind of suddenly appeared in the conversation,” said Fecke-Stoudt. “I didn’t see it happen at that time, because I was engaged in the conversation, but I’m like, all of a sudden, ’there’s Saul. Why is Saul in this conversation all of a sudden?'”
It is important to note that, according to both activists’ accounts and records obtained by DBA/CMD, Saul did not only attend anarchist protest planning meetings. Throughout his time as an activist infiltrator, Saul rubbed elbows with members of Occupy Phoenix, immigrants’ rights groups, faith-based organizations, indigenous rights groups, and others.
Records obtained by DBA/CMD show that Saul would report on these ALEC protest planning meetings to Van Dorn, who would then forward the intelligence on to PPDHDB personnel.
For example, on October 26, 2011, Van Dorn sent the following email to PPDHDB Lt. Lawrence “Larry” Hein, PPDHDB Sgt. Pat “Patrick” Kotecki and PPDMOB Lt. John Geroulis:
“Hey Bosses,” wrote Van Dorn. “Saul has stated that the Anarchists have officially posted the ‘resist ALEC’ on their website but they haven’t discussed specifics on how to disrupt the conference [sic]. There are also two websites that might be worth the TLO’s [ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison Officers”] monitoring.”
Van Dorn then went on to provide a link to “azresistsalec.wordpress.com,” and to detail the number of “likes” on the Facebook page associated with that site.
“According to Saul they are supposed to be having ‘resist ALEC’ training this weekend in downtown Phoenix as well,” added Van Dorn. “Kepp you updated [sic].”
Records indicate that PPDHDB Sgt. Kotecki forwarded this intelligence on to PPDHDB Det./ACTIC TLO Rohme with instructions to “monitor and advise.”
Records obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy show that PPDMOB Career Criminal Squad Sgt. Van Dorn and a PPDMOB undercover detective named Saul Ayala attended two meetings (November 18 and 23, 2011), held in the ACTIC “training room.” The subject of both these meetings was planned protests of the ALEC conference.
Interestingly enough, records indicate that PPDHDB Det./ACTIC TLO Michael Rohme had invited Westin Kierland Director of Security Phil Black to attend the November 23 ACTIC meeting. According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, Rohme had been the chief ACTIC point of contact between ALEC personnel in the months leading up to the 2011 SNPS. Such ALEC-related personnel Rohme had shared ACTIC resources/information with included Bayer Healthcare Head of Security Mark Davis. Bayer Healthcare is a longtime ALEC private sector member and had served as co-chair of the ALEC Health and Human Services Task Force for several years, ending in 2011. At the time of the ALEC 2011 SNPS, Bayer Healthcare’s parent corporation, Bayer Corporation, served as “first vice chairman” of the ALEC Private Enterprise Board Executive Committee.
And, speaking to the private sector clout carried by ALEC in the world of “counter terrorism” public-private intelligence sharing partnerships, consider this: Arizona Public Service/Pinnacle West Capital Corporation (APS) served as a “chairman” level sponsor of the 2011 ALEC SNPS. The chairman of the Downtown Phoenix Partnership (DPP, an economic development corporation whose members are clearly active in ACTIC CLP) Board of Directors is APS/Pinnacle West President and CEO Donald Brandt. APS Enterprise Security Operations Director Bob Parrish served as longtime board member of Arizona Infragard at this time as well.
Furthermore, records obtained by DBA/CMD show that, in February of 2012, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Protective Security Advisor Christine Figueroa forwarded open source intelligence (derived from activist Facebook postings and the Occupy Phoenix events calendar) pertaining to planned February 29, 2012 protests of ALEC-member corporations (a nationwide effort launched by Occupy Portland, Oregon) to ACTIC personnel (including O’Neill) and other U.S. DHS personnel.
According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, the information distributed by Figueroa had been gathered by Salt River Project (SRP) Security Manager Jay Spradling. This Spradling advisory reiterated activist plans (as posted on the Occupy Phoenix events calendar) to “march from [Freeport-McMoran Center, worldwide headquarters of Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold, Inc.] to other ALEC corporations downtown. Send them a message that we won’t stand for the corporate takeover of our democracy any longer,” and to (as stated on the Occupy Phoenix Facebook page) hold a press conference for the purpose of “informing people about what ALEC is and why they are bad!” Records show that this information was then passed on, through PPDCRB Sgt. Schweikert, to Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold Manager of Corporate Security Thomas Tyo.
At the time of the F-29 protests SRP lobbyist Russell Smoldon served as the ALEC Arizona “private sector chair” (largely responsible for ALEC Arizona “scholarship fund” fundraising) and Freeport-McMoran Copper and Gold served as a “director” level sponsor of the 2011 ALEC SNPS. Freeport-McMoran is also active in ACTIC CLP through its position on the Downtown Phoenix Partnership Board of Directors.
As indicated by records obtained by DBA/CMD, as well as accounts of activists interviewed, Saul’s participation in ALEC protest planning meetings ended on November 9, 2011. The PPDMOB undercover detective attended an ALEC protest planning meeting that evening, after which an immigrants’ rights activist approached Saul and confronted him about his life as a cop.
According to the activist (who spoke to DBA/CMD on condition of anonymity), she had worked as a barista at a Phoenix Starbucks some years prior. During her time as a barista, the woman and her co-workers had become accustomed to the habits of two police officers who would come into the cafe to order drinks every night, while the cafe was closing. Rather than leaving coffee machines on and uncleaned, the cafe workers would set drinks aside for these two officers. One of these officers, said the activist, was the man who currently represented himself as the homeless anarchist wannabe, “Saul DeLara.”
According to this activist, when confronted, Saul denied having ever seen her before and angrily denied being a cop. Nevertheless, word of Saul’s possible relationship with law enforcement spread quickly through the Phoenix activist community and, as indicated by records obtained by DBA/CMD, details of this November 9 meeting were the last to be gathered by Saul and relayed through Van Dorn to PPDHDB/ACTIC personnel.
PPD Public Information Officer Trent Crump declined to confirm whether PPDMOB undercover detective Saul Ayala was in fact the man who presented himself to Phoenix activists as “Saul DeLara,” or to discuss any specifics of PPD undercover officer activity related to Occupy Phoenix or other Phoenix activist groups. However, Crump did state that it is a “regular practice” of PPD to employ “plainclothes or undercover” officers in the gathering of intelligence related to activist activity that may include “civil disobedience.”
When asked what suspicion of criminal activity PPD used to predicate such intelligence gathering conducted by undercover officers, Crump stated:
“I don’t even think that one has to say that we have to anticipate that there’s going to be criminal activity for us to gather intelligence — public safety is one of our job responsibilities. So, when we know they’re going to have, very possibly, some civil unrest, or we know we may have large groups of people organizing to rally under a protest — or whatever you want to call it — we gather intelligence on this, absolutely.”
Brenda the “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Facebook Queen
According to records obtained by DBA/CMD from the Arizona Department of Homeland Security (AZDOHS, the state agency that essentially acts as a bursar for U.S. DHS Arizona grant awards), PPD was awarded $1,016,897 in U.S. DHS State Homeland Security Grant Program funding in September of 2010 for the PPD “ACTIC Intelligence Analyst Project.” According to these AZDOHS records, these funds were intended to fill positions for both a PPD “ACTIC Intelligence Analyst” and “IT Planner.” Records obtained by DBA/CMD indicate that these project funds have been used, in part, to hire and pay the more than $71,000 compensation (this figure includes salary and benefits) of PPDHDB/ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Brenda Dowhan.
According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, Dowhan’s primary role at ACTIC over the course of 2011 (according to records, Dowhan appears to have been hired in July of 2011) and 2012 appears to have been the monitoring of social media activity associated with individuals involved in Occupy Phoenix — as well as to create bulletins for distribution to both ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison Officers” and other “fusion center” personnel nationwide, detailing trends in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, in order to facilitate Dowhan’s work PPD personnel regularly fed the “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” logs containing the names, addresses, social security numbers, driver’s license/state identification numbers, and physical descriptions of citizens arrested, issued citations — or even given “warnings” by police — in connection with Occupy Phoenix. The vast majority of these citizens who had been arrested, or had other interactions with PPD, were cited/warned for alleged violations of the city’s “urban camping” ordinance.
Records indicate that Dowhan took her job very seriously. Records obtained by DBA/CMD show that when, in December of 2011, two members of Occupy Phoenix posted plans to travel to Flagstaff for Christmas, Dowhan alerted ACTIC Terrorism Liaison Officers in the Flagstaff area to their impending arrival.
And, records show that, in November, 2011, when Dowhan first became concerned that those she surveilled within the Phoenix activist community may eventually detect her presence online, she asked her PPDHDB superiors if they could discuss the possibility of her using a “clean computer,” possibly one with an “anonymizer,” in the future. This appears to have been a reference to a computer utility product, made by Anonymizer, Inc., that allows users to visit websites anonymously.
In fact, Dowhan was so dedicated to her job of monitoring the Facebook posts (and other social media/blogs) of members of Occupy Phoenix that, when, on December 16, 2011, FBI agent Alan McHugh contacted ACTIC/Arizona Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) personnel (including FBI Phoenix JTTF Special Agent Marcus Williams and U.S. DHS Intelligence Analyst Anthony Frangipane) to advise them of a planned December 17 Occupy Phoenix protest to be held outside the Phoenix office of U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) in opposition to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA 2012), ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Dowhan giddily responded:
“Good Morning Alan [sic] [paragraph break] Tracking the activities of Occupy Phoenix is one of my daily responsibilities. My primary role is to look at the social media, websites, and blogs. I just wanted to put it out there so that if you would like me to share with you or you have something to share, we can collaborate [sic].”
Dowhan went on to state that ACTIC/PPDHDB was also concerned about the NDAA 2012 protest (dubbed by Occupy Phoenix the “No Indefinite Detention Rally”) as well as other Occupy Phoenix events planned for coming days. In closing, Dowhan stated that she would continue to “monitor online activities to get an idea of what kind of participation we can expect.”
This glimpse into the day-to-day working life of those in the “counter terrorism” world is, of course, hilariously ironic, since citizens protesting NDAA 2012 were protesting provisions of the law that would allow for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens who are even suspected of aiding, committing, or plotting acts of terrorism, “hostilities,” or any other “belligerent acts” against the nation.
However, perhaps a much less humorous side of this reality is illustrated in an October, 2011 advisory sent out to “fusion center”/”counter terrorism” personnel nationwide by Transportation Security Administration (TSA, a component of U.S. DHS) Office of Intelligence Field Intelligence Officer Larry Tortorich. In this advisory, focused on a planned October 6 Occupy New Orleans march, Tortorich opined: “the potential always exists for extremists to exploit or redirect events such as this or use the event to escalate or trigger their own agendas. […] Jihadists recently discussed how they can benefit from the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been ongoing in New York City, and suggested ’that their continuation will make the enemy lose focus on the wars abroad.'” [It is not known what “Jihadists” Tortorich referenced.]
It is also worth noting that, according to records obtained by DBA/CMD, when President Barack Obama visited the Phoenix area in January of 2012, ACTIC personnel monitored associated NDAA 2012 protests. Furthermore records indicate that the U.S. Capitol Police Office of Intelligence Analysis (working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) had monitored Arizona protest activity aimed at NDAA 2012 in February of 2012.
In any event, let’s get back to Dowhan. While records obtained by DBA/CMD do show that Dowhan spent tremendous amounts of time trolling the Facebook pages of citizens engaged in Occupy Phoenix, as well as other Occupy Wall Street and activist groups, during 2011 and 2012, the mere culling of “open source intelligence” was not the extent of Dowhan’s U.S. Department of Homeland Security-funded activities.
Records obtained by DBA/CMD show multiple instances in which Dowhan attempted to identify citizens believed to be active in the Occupy Phoenix/Occupy Wall Street movement (though not believed to have committed any crime — other than an allegation of marijuana use, as discussed below) through the use of biometric data analysis applied to photos found on Facebook.
One example of the use of this facial recognition technology is as follows:
On November 18, 2011, ACTIC received information pertaining to an individual reported to be involved with Occupy Phoenix. This information came in the form of an anonymous tip submitted to ACTIC personnel through the Silent Witness “web tip” program (a service provided to ACTIC personnel by The Silent Witness, Inc., a private non profit corporation).
The anonymous tip stated:
“Met an Occupy nut online, she says she’s from your area […] She appears to be involved with some sort of violent organization. Has expressed intent to ’take down the local power structure,’ desire to be killed in violent resistance as a martyr: ‘GOOD KILL US. That will really make people mad!'”
The anonymous “tipster” (records identified the source of this information as being “Web Tipster,” and Dowhan subsequently referred to the informant as “the tipster”) then went on to state that the “Occupy nut” “[had] indicated knowledge of specific plans for violent revolt, knowledge of bomb-related activities. When pressed further was reticent, claimed she did not want to give more details on the plans due to ‘outstanding warrants and paranoia’. [sic]”
In closing, the “tipster” wrote:
“Additionally, since I’m aware no crime has technically been committed there (apart for whatever the warrants are for), I’ve got an actual crime for you as well: illegal possession/use of marijuana, I’ve seen her smoking it on camera. I will attempt to get a picture in the future. [Paragraph break] I’m well aware that the threat of violence sounds like someone yanking my chain, and it quite possibly is, but she sounds serious about this and I feel it’s better to falsely report than to not report an actual threat.”
The anonymous “tipster” then went on to identify the “Occupy nut” as being a 20-year-old female known as “Amber.” The tipster stated that the young woman was unemployed and living with her twin sister and father. The tipster also provided ACTIC personnel with a photograph of what appears to be a teen-aged girl wearing eye glasses seated in front of a computer (the photo appears to have been taken by a monitor-mounted camera).
ACTIC PPDHD “Terrorism Liason All-Hazards Analyst” Dowhan immediately followed up on this tip on November 18, 2011, by distributing information contained in the anonymous tip to PPDHDB personnel.
In a December 23 email from Dowhan to PPDHDB Det./ACTIC TLO Christopher “CJ” Wren, PPDHDB Det./ACTIC TLO Rohme and PPDHDB Det. Robert Bolvin, Dowhan stated that she had attempted to identify “Amber” through the use of facial recognition technology, but that the attempt had failed.
“We have a Facebook photo and tried to do facial recognition, but she was wearing glasses,” wrote Dowhan in the December 23 email.
The facial recognition resources that Dowhan utilized in her efforts to identify individuals believed to be associated with Occupy Wall Street groups are provided through the ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit, a unit housed within ACTIC and operated by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).
According to records obtained from the Arizona Department of Homeland Security by DBA/CMD, the ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit has the ability to match biometric data contained in photographs — such as those found on Facebook — with biometric data contained in roughly 18 million Arizona Driver’s License photos, 4.7 million Arizona county/municipal jail “booking” photos, 12,000 photos contained in the “Arizona Sex Offender Database,” and 2 million photos available through the Federal Joint Automated Booking System.
The ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit, according to these AZDOHS records, also has the ability to utilize “portable units” during “special events.” And, according to AZDOHS records, MCSO has requested additional U.S. DHS funding in order to purchase additional “facial recognition video capture” technologies.
The ACTIC Facial Recognition Unit currently utilizes technology and services purchased from Hummingbird Defense Systems, Inc. (HDSI, a Nevada corporation allegedly headquartered in Phoenix, but which has had its status as an active corporation revoked in both Nevada and Arizona since at least 2008). HDSI purports to have partnered with Detaq Solutions in 2002 in the development of a biometric surveillance system for the Beijing Public Security Bureau. Part of this system, according to HDSI, was a “centralized biometric database […] that was deployed to help secure Tiananmen Square.” As such, HDSI boasts that this system “was awarded ‘National Technology Treasure’ status by the Ministry of Public Security of China.”
Tiananmen Square was, of course, the site of the massacre of hundreds of peaceful Chinese student protestors by People’s Republic of China armed forces on June 4, 1989. The students, demanding government reform, had occupied the square for weeks prior to the massacre. The site, and the “June 4 Massacre,” have remained significant rallying points to government reform activists in China.
All Actors in Play: the Facebook Queen, the Creepy Guy, Public-Private Partnerships, and Paid Cops
Occupy Phoenix was not a large operation. Despite a relatively large turnout during the group’s inaugural march on October 15, 2011 (which peaked at about 1,000 participants), the Occupy Phoenix encampment in Cesar Chavez Plaza typically saw fewer than 50 “occupiers.” So, given the galvanizing force offered in opposition to ALEC throughout the spectrum of the Phoenix activist community, protests of the 2011 ALEC SNPS were, by far, the most well-attended Occupy Phoenix protest events to take place during 2011 or 2012, aside from the initial October 15, 2011 march.
The largest of these protests was held on the morning of the first full day of the conference, November 30, outside the Westin Kierland’s east gate. Protestors, numbering in the hundreds, marched to the gate as ALEC member lawmakers, lobbyists, corporate executives, and right-wing ’think tank’ luminaries were ushered into the resort through security check points. Arizona Governor Brewer was to be the keynote speaker at the day’s ALEC luncheon, held in one of the Kierland’s many grand dining rooms.
At about 9:40 a.m., an incident took place between protestors and riot gear-clad PPD “mobile field force” officers who had established a “tactical response unit” (TRU) outside the Kierland’s eastern gate. All told, five protestors were arrested on charges of trespassing and “crossing a police line” during this incident.
Following the arrests, PPD officials told local media that officers had been attacked by wild-eyed “anarchists” brandishing “nail filled sticks” and that these “anarchists” had attempted to overthrow police barricades with metal poles. These attacks, according to PPD officials parroted in media accounts, had “forced” officers to deploy amounts of oleoresin capsicum (“OC”) spray into the crowd and make the five arrests.
Interestingly, this PPD version of events, wherein officers were provoked by violent “anarchists” with “nail filled sticks,” seems to have little semblance to reality.
The following version of events that took place outside the east gate of the Westin Kierland, at approximately 9:40 a.m., November 30, 2011, is based on video evidence that resulted in the dismissal of charges against one of the activists arrested, as well as photographs and police records obtained from PPDHDB/PPD by DBA/CMD:
At approximately 9:40 a.m., several PPD officers (many of whom did not wear any identification, in violation of departmental policy), deployed as part of a TRU, were met by a group of protestors who had marched to the eastern entrance of the resort and stopped approximately 50 feet from a barrier line established by TRU officers. Protestors at the front of the group held a large banner. Behind these protestors were a number of other protestors. Some of these other protestors held signs, and some played marching band music on musical instruments. The crowd of protestors, contrary to PPD accounts, was not composed entirely, or mostly, of “anarchists.” Present at this protest were members of Occupy Phoenix, members of several immigrants’ rights groups, members of indigenous rights groups, members of faith-based groups, concerned citizens, as well as a small group of individuals who described themselves as being “anarchists.”
The protest group having stopped well outside the established police barricade line, four protestors moved to the front of the large banner at the head of the procession and sat passively on the ground — remaining several (approximately 30 to 40) feet from the police barricades.
Shortly after these four protestors had seated themselves, several TRU officers picked up a metal barricade, carried it over to where the protestors sat, and pushed the barricade down on top of them, as if to crush the protestors. At this point, another protestor, Ezra Kaplan, a member of the Occupy Phoenix media group, walked over to where the police were pushing the barricade down on protestors and started taking pictures with his camera. The TRU officers then lifted the metal barricade over the seated protestors and shoved it directly into the banner, pinning the cameraman between the police line and the banner. Protestors then began to shout: “we’re non-violent,” at which point the four seated protestors and Kaplan were grabbed by officers, rushed onto resort property and arrested on charges of “crossing a police line” and trespassing. At this point, TRU officer PPD Violent Crimes Bureau Gang Enforcement Unit Detective Gregory Liebertz, reached into the crowd, grabbed the banner and began spraying protestors with OC spray. This officer was joined by several other officers in pulling, tearing, and eventually stomping the banner. Simultaneously, several other officers also deployed OC spray on the protestors. With the onset of this police aggression, the protestors temporarily disbanded and retreated.
At no point does this video footage show any sign of crazed “anarchists” (or any other protestor) swinging “nail filled sticks” at officers, or of “anarchists” (or other protestors) attempting to overturn police barricades.
In reality, the TRU/”mobile field force” officers had been working under the command of PPD Sgt. Eric Harkins. According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, at the time of this incident Harkins was actually off-duty, earning $35 per hour as a private security guard employed by ALEC, under the direction of Westin Kierland Director of Security Phil Black. Records show that, by the time SNPS ended, Harkins had earned $630 for security services rendered to ALEC and Westin Kierland during November 30 and December 1.
Harkins wasn’t alone in this paid service to ALEC/Westin Kierland. Records indicate that ALEC/Westin Kierland had hired 49 active duty and 9 retired PPD officers to act as private security during the conference. All told, ALEC/Westin Kierland paid out a total of $36,015 in “off-duty” pay to these officers.
[Note: records obtained by DBA/CMD relating to this off-duty job detail clearly state that the “client company” for this event was ALEC. As previously discussed, other records obtained by DBA/CMD show that Westin Kierland Director of Security Black, clearly working for the benefit of ALEC, had coordinated closely with both ALEC personnel and PPDHDB/ACTIC personnel in preparation for this event.]
It is not known how many of these off-duty PPD officers working as private security for the ALEC conference were involved in the TRU/”mobile field force” incident at the Westin Kierland east gate, but it is known that Harkins and another off-duty officer working as private ALEC/Kierland security, Eric Carpenter (paid a total of $630 by ALEC/Kierland for services rendered), personally arrested the Occupy Phoenix photographer, Ezra Kaplan. Furthermore, Officer Carpenter’s report of the incident (actually filed as the joint report of both Harkins and Carpenter) explicitly states that Sgt. Harkins had “advised nearby officers to place [the four seated protestors] under arrest.”
As further stated in the Harkins/Carpenter report, off-duty officers had attended a briefing prior to the protests at which they were told, by PPD Off-Duty Job Coordinator Officer Tim Moore (who was paid $2,065 by ALEC/Kierland for services rendered under the direction of Black during the conference. Moore had also attended several meetings of both ACTIC and ALEC personnel regarding the planned protests, some of which were also apparently attended by PPDMOB Career Criminal Squad Sgt. Van Dorn and PPDMOB undercover detective Saul Ayala) that “no protestors were wanted on resort property and that the resort would want prosecution.” And, indeed, the five protestors arrested at the Kierland’s east gate were prosecuted — based, in part, on demonstrably false claims made by these off-duty police officers.
As for the presence of “mobile field force”/TRU officers at the gates of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa during the ALEC SNPS, records obtained by DBA/CMD show that Black, citing an “article” he had been given by personnel employed by ALEC, had discussed the possibility of deploying a “mobile field force” to the grounds of the resort during the conference with PPDHDB Det./ACTIC TLO Rohme.
The article cited by Black as grounds for this “mobile field force” presence (“Occupy Wall Street Gets More Violent”) was written by Heritage Foundation Assistant Director of Strategic Communications Mike Brownfield, and had been published in a Heritage Foundation newsletter. Conspicuously absent from records obtained by DBA/CMD relating to the acquisition of a “mobile field force” apropos the Heritage Foundation “article,” is any disclosure on the part of ALEC personnel (or personnel working on behalf of ALEC, including Black) of the fact that Heritage is an ALEC member ’think tank,’ co-founded by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich, and financed by many of the very same corporate interests that comprise ALEC “private sector” membership.
What’s more, according to records obtained by DBA/CMD, off-duty officers employed as private security for ALEC/Kierland had been given “face sheets,” generated by PPDHDB, containing the photographs (mostly driver’s license photos) of 24 Phoenix and Tucson-area activists listed as “persons of interest to the ALEC conference.” Such activists listed on the ALEC “face sheet” included members of Occupy Phoenix, anarchists, prison reform activists, members of Phoenix Cop Watch (a watchdog group that seeks to police unscrupulous or illegal actions of local law enforcement) and others.
While the exact purpose of the ALEC “face sheet” is unknown, since none of the activists listed on the sheet (with the exception of one activist who had been arrested prior to the ALEC event) were wanted in relation to any alleged crime at the time of the ALEC conference. For his part, PPD Public Information Officer Crump declined to answer any questions relating to the ALEC “face sheet.” Nevertheless, a November 17 email sent from ACTIC/PPDHDB “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Dowhan to ACTIC/DPS Intelligence Bureau Analyst Annette Roberts may provide some insight to PPDHDB/ACTIC motives [Note: DPS Northern Intelligence District Commander, Captain Steve Harrison, did not respond to requests seeking information pertaining to Roberts’ position within DPS. Records do, however, suggest that Roberts is most likely a DPS Intelligence Bureau analyst]:
“The ACTIC has identified groups that intend ‘Shut ALEC Down.’ While some may merely protest the event, such as Anti-SB1070 and the Occupy Phoenix movement, anarchist groups have shown a determination to disrupt and shut down the event with the use of violent tactics experienced by other states hosting these meetings. The Phoenix Police Department is taking the lead to identify and intercept persons they believe to pose a threat to the event or attendees.”
It should be noted that, regardless of Dowhan’s assertions, previous ALEC conferences were not — by any stretch of the imagination — subject to any “violent tactics” perpetrated by “anarchists” (or any other individuals). Indeed, the sole arrest to have occurred at any ALEC conference protest prior to the Scottsdale ALEC SNPS took place in New Orleans in August of 2011, during the ALEC Annual Meeting held at the Marriott New Orleans French Quarter Hotel. According to New Orleans Police Department records, on August 5 an officer (who was off-duty, working as private security for the ALEC conference) arrested a male subject for allegedly spray painting an “unknown symbol resembling the letter ‘A’ with a circle around it (in red color)” on Marriott property.
Nevertheless, this much, regarding the application of the ALEC “face sheet,” is known: during the ALEC protest on the morning of November 30, 2011, Jason Odhner, a Quaker street medic working with the Phoenix Urban Health Collective, was handcuffed by a police officer, who was likely off-duty and working as private security for ALEC/Kierland, while walking across a slim portion of the the Kierland golf course and detained in the back of a police vehicle for more than an hour (though he was not charged with any crime). At the time of Odhner’s false arrest, he had been seeking treatment for a protestor who was suffering from heat-related symptoms. Not surprisingly, Ohdner’s name and driver’s license photo were present on the ALEC “persons of interest” “face sheet.”
According to both a copy of the ALEC “face sheet” and other records obtained by DBA/CMD, officers equipped with this “face sheet” were instructed — by none other than the sheet’s creator, ACTIC “Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards Analyst” Brenda Dowhan — to destroy all copies of the “face sheet” after the ALEC event. And, as most — if not all — of the activists pictured on the ALEC “face sheet” had either known, been Facebook friends with, or been at ALEC protest planning meetings attended by, the “creepy guy” calling himself “Saul DeLara,” it is clear that intelligence provided to Dowhan in the creation of this “face sheet” likely had its origins, at least in part, with the PPDMOB undercover detective who had infiltrated the Phoenix activist community.
Beau Hodai is a freelance journalist and publisher of DBA Press, an online news publication and source materials archive. He can be reached at publisher@dbapress.com
By Beau Hodai / PR Watch May 22, 2013
Find this story at 22 May 2013
Copyright alternet.org
The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for a month. And it seems the FBI and NYPD have had help tracking protesters’ moves thanks to a conservative computer security expert who gained access to one of the group’s internal mailing lists, and then handed over information on the group’s plans to authorities and corporations targeted by protesters.
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Since the Occupy Wall Street protest began on September 17, New York security consultant Thomas Ryan has been waging a campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan says he’s done contract work for the U.S. Army and he brags on his blog that he leads “a team called Black Cell, a team of the most-highly trained and capable physical, threat and cyber security professionals in the world.” But over the past few weeks, he and his computer security buddies have been spending time covertly attending Occupy Wall Street meetings, monitoring organizers’ social media accounts, and hanging out with protesters in Lower Manhattan.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
As part of their intelligence-gathering operation, the group gained access to a listserv used by Occupy Wall Street organizers called September17discuss. On September17discuss, organizers hash out tactics and plan events, conduct post-mortems of media appearances, and trade the latest protest gossip. On Friday, Ryan leaked thousands of September17discuss emails to conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is now using them to try to smear Occupy Wall Street as an anarchist conspiracy to disrupt global markets.
What may much more alarming to Occupy Wall Street organizers is that while Ryan was monitoring September17discuss, he was forwarding interesting email threads to contacts at the NYPD and FBI, including special agent Jordan T. Loyd, a member of the FBI’s New York-based cyber security team.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
On September 18th, the day after the protest’s start, Ryan forwarded an email exchange between Occupy Wall Street organizers to Loyd. The email exchange is harmless: Organizers discuss how they need to increase union participation in the protest. “We need more outreach to workers. The best way to do that is by showing solidarity with them,” writes organizer Jackie DiSalvo in the thread. She then lists a group of potential unions to work with.
Another organizer named Conor responds: “+1,000,000 to Jackie’s proposal on working people/union struggles outreach and solidarity. Also, why not invite people to protest Troy Davis’s execution date at Liberty Plaza this Monday?”
Five minutes after Conor sent his email, Ryan forwarded the thread—with no additional comment—to Loyd’s FBI email address. “Thanks!” Loyd responded. He cc’d his colleague named Ilhwan Yum, a fellow cybersecurity expert at the agency, on the reply.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
On September 26th, Ryan forwarded another email thread to Agent Loyd. But this time he clued in the NYPD as well, sending the email to Dennis Dragos, a detective with the NYPD Computer Crimes Squad.
The NYPD might have been very grateful he did so, since it involved a proposed demonstration outside NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. In the thread, organizers debated whether to crash an upcoming press conference planned by marijuana advocates to celebrate NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly ordering officers to halt arrests over possession of small amounts of marijuana.
“Should we bring some folks from Liberty Plaza to chant “SHAME” for the NYPD’s recent brutalities on Thursday night for the Troy Davis and Saturday for the Occupy Wall Street march?” asked one person in the email thread. (That past Saturday, the video of NYPD officer Anthony Bologna pepper-spraying a protester had gone viral.) Ryan promptly forwarded the email thread to Loyd at the FBI and Dragos at the NYPD.
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Interestingly, it was Ryan who revealed himself as a snitch. We learned of these emails from the archive Ryan leaked yesterday in the hopes of undermining the Occupy Wall Street movement. In assembling the archive of September17discuss emails, it appears he accidentally included some of his own forwarded emails indicating he was ratting out organizers.
“I don’t know, I just put everything I had into one big package,” Ryan said when asked how the emails ended up in the file posted to Andrew Breitbart’s blog. Some security expert.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
But Ryan didn’t just tip off the authorities. He was also giving information to companies as well. When protesters discussed demonstrating in front of morning shows like Today and Good Morning America, Ryan quickly forwarded the thread to Mark Farrell, the chief security officer at Comcast, the parent company of NBC Universal.
Ryan wrote:
Since you are the CSO, I am not sure of your role in NBC since COMCAST owns them.
There is a huge protest in New York call “Occupy Wall Street”. Here is an email of stunts that they will try to pull on the TODAY show.
We have been heavily monitoring Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.
“Thanks Tom,” Farrell responded. “I’ll pass this to my counterpart at NBCU.”
Did the FBI and/or NYPD ask him to monitor Occupy Wall Street? Was he just forwarding the emails on out of the goodness of his heart? In a phone interview with us, Ryan denied being an informant. “I do not work with the FBI,” he said.
Ryan said he knows Loyd through their mutual involvement in the Open Web Application Security Project, a non-profit computer security group of which Ryan is a board member. Ryan said he sent the emails to Loyd unsolicited simply because “everyone’s curious” about Occupy Wall Street, and he had a ground-eye view. “Jordan never asked me for anything.”
Was he sending every email he got to the authorities? Ryan said he couldn’t remember how many he’d passed on to the FBI or NYPD, or other third parties. Later he said that he only forwarded the two emails we noticed, detailed above.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
But even if he’d been sending them on regularly, they were probably of limited use to the authorities. Most of the real organizing at Occupy Wall Street happens face-to-face, according to David Graeber, who was one of the earliest organizers. “We did some practical work on [the email list] at first—I think that’s where I first proposed the “we are the 99%” motto—but mainly it’s just an expressive forum,” he wrote in an email. “No one would seriously discuss a plan to do something covert or dangerous on such a list.”
But regardless of how many emails Ryan sent—or whether Loyd ever asked Ryan to spy on Occupy Wall Street—Loyd was almost certainly interested in the emails he received. Loyd has helped hunt down members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, and he and his colleagues in the FBI’s cyber security squad have been monitoring their involvement in Occupy Wall Street.
Meet the Guy Who Snitched on Occupy Wall Street to the FBI and NYPD
At a New York cyber security conference one day before the protest began, Loyd cited Occupy Wall Street as an example of a “newly emerging threat to U.S. information systems.” (In the lead-up to Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous had issued threats against the New York Stock Exchange.) He told the assembled crowd the FBI has been “monitoring the event on cyberspace and are preparing to meet it with physical security,” according to a New York Institute of Technology press release.
We contacted Loyd to ask about his relationship with Ryan and if any of the information Ryan passed along was of any use to the agency. He declined to answer questions and referred us to the FBI’s press office. We’ll post an update if we hear back from them.
We asked Ryan again this morning about how closely he was working with the authorities. Again, he claimed it was only these two emails, which is unlikely given he forwarded them to the FBI and NYPD without providing any context or explaining where he’d gotten them.
And he detailed his rationale for assisting the NYPD:
My respect for FDNY & NYPD stems from them risking their lives to save mine when my house was on fire in sunset park when I was 8 yrs old. Also, for them risking their lives and saving many family and friends during 9/11.
Don’t you find it Ironic that out of all the NYPD involved with the protest, [protesters] have only targeted the ones with Black Ribbons, given to them for their bravery during 9/11?
I am sorry if we see things differently, I try to look at everything as a whole and in patterns. Everything we do in life and happens in life, there is a pattern behind it.
Adrian Chen
10/15/11 4:47pm
Find this story at 15 October 2011
Copyright gawker.com
OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, the Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement officers have engaged in widespread domestic spying on Occupy Wall Street activists, among others, on the shaky premise that these activists pose a terrorist threat. Often, Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies have coordinated with the private sector, working on behalf of, or in cooperation with, Wall Street firms and other companies the protesters have criticized.
Thousands of public documents recently obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy add new evidence to an increasingly powerful case that law enforcement has been overstepping its bounds. The documents, obtained through state and federal open records searches and Freedom of Information Act requests, demonstrate that law enforcement agencies may be attempting to criminalize thousands of American citizens for simply voicing their disapproval of corporate dominance over our economic and political system.
The anti-terrorist apparatus that the U.S. government established after 9/11 has now been turned against law-abiding citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. This apparatus consists not only of advanced surveillance technologies but also of “fusion centers” in state after state that coordinate the efforts of law enforcement up and down the line and collaborate with leading members of the private sector. Often, the work they do in the name of national security advances the interests of some of the largest corporations in America rather than focusing on protecting the United States from actual threats or attacks, such as the one at the Boston Marathon on April 15.
“The government has built a giant domestic surveillance apparatus in the name of homeland security that has been unleashed on ordinary Americans expressing concern about the undue influence of corporations on our democracy,” says Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and the former senior legislative strategist on national security for the ACLU. “Millions and millions of our tax dollars are being squandered violating the rights of innocent Americans who dare to dissent about legal policies and who have zero connection to any violent crime intended to cause terror.”
The documents reveal many instances of such misdirected work by law enforcement around the country. The picture they paint of law enforcement in the Phoenix area is a case in point. The police departments there, working with a statewide fusion center and heavily financed by the Department of Homeland Security, devoted tremendous resources to tracking and infiltrating Occupy Phoenix and other activist groups.
In October 2011, Jamie Dimon, the president and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was coming to town. A giant on Wall Street, Dimon heads the largest bank in the country, which played a pivotal and disreputable role in the collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008. Dimon was holding an event with thousands of his employees at Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, in downtown Phoenix. Four days before the meeting, JPMorgan Chase’s regional security manager, Dan Grady, called detective Jennifer O’Neill of the Homeland Defense Bureau of the Phoenix Police Department and told her of the impending event. The two of them were primarily concerned that activists who had recently formed the group Occupy Phoenix might try to disrupt the event — or otherwise inconvenience Dimon.
O’Neill made it her job to monitor possible “terrorist” activity by Occupy Phoenix connected with Dimon’s visit.
The monitoring of social media for JPMorgan Chase is just a glimpse into the widespread snooping on Occupy activists that Arizona law enforcement engaged in, often on behalf of the private sector.
O’Neill serves as the coordinator of the “Community Liaison Program” of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, which is the state’s fusion center. That center consists of representatives from the Phoenix, Mesa, and Tempe police departments’ homeland defense units; the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office; the Arizona Department of Public Safety Intelligence Unit; the FBI Arizona Joint Terrorism Task Force; Arizona Infragard, an FBI-business alliance; and Homeland Security. The fusion center received $30,000 in funding from Homeland Security in 2012 for “advertising” its work, and expanding private sector participation in it.
O’Neill often shares intelligence from this center with the security chiefs at banks and other corporations. The stated purpose of the liaison program is to prevent terrorist activity, to identify terrorist threats, protect critical infrastructure, and “create an awareness of localized security issues, challenges, and business interdependencies.” But records indicate that it was often used as an advance warning system to alert corporations and banks of impending Occupy Phoenix protests.
O’Neill had good intelligence on Occupy Phoenix, since the police department had sent an undercover cop to attend some of the earliest meetings of the group. The impostor presented himself as a homeless Mexican national named Saul DeLara, and he attended the Occupy Phoenix planning meeting held on October 2 at a local coffee shop. He delivered a detailed report on the activists’ plans to Sergeant Tom Van Dorn of the Phoenix Police Department’s Major Offender Bureau Career Criminal Squad. Meanwhile, the Phoenix Police Department was continually monitoring the group’s Facebook page at the urging of Van Dorn.
The Phoenix Police Department held an “Occupy Arizona Event Planning Meeting” in early October 2011, which was attended by two detectives from the department who also worked as Terrorism Liaison Officers for the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. The Phoenix Convention Center’s head of security was also invited to the meeting. The department came up with an “incident action plan” to handle protests, which included “mass arrest” teams and the possible formation of a “mobile field force” or “tactical response unit” empowered to use pepper spray and chemical agents.
Detective Christopher “CJ” Wren, one of the Terrorism Liaison Officers, was designated as the “group supervisor” of the incident action plan. He worked with the Phoenix Fire Department as well as the Phoenix Drug Enforcement Bureau, which assigned thirteen undercover vice unit officers to the Occupy Phoenix events.
The Phoenix Police Department was also working closely with the Downtown Phoenix Partnership. That group “exists to strengthen Downtown Phoenix development and to encourage an environment of activity, energy, and vitality,” says its website. Among its board members are executives from such financial institutions as the Alliance Bank of Arizona, the consulting firm Ernst & Young, the huge mining company Freeport-McMoRan, and Republic Media, which owns the state’s largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, as well as the Phoenix NBC affiliate.
The Phoenix Police Department called this downtown group a “strategic partner” in preparation for Occupy Phoenix events. The police department briefed downtown banks about planned protests and, according to one document, vowed that it would continue to work with them on this issue.
On October 14, about 300 protesters assembled at Civic Space Park in downtown Phoenix and marched peacefully to Chase Tower, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo Plaza. The police made no arrests that day.
On October 15, some 1,000 protesters gathered in Cesar Chavez Plaza, and several hundred of them marched to a nearby park, where police officers began issuing warnings to protesters to disperse at 11 p.m. The police arrested forty-five protesters for refusing to leave the park, and three more at Cesar Chavez Plaza — one for trespassing and two for “creating an unsafe hazard in the street.”
The Phoenix Police Department spent $245,200.08 in taxpayer funds on the policing of Occupy Phoenix between October 14 and October 16, 2011, according to the documents obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy.
But that wasn’t the end of the surveillance. In an October 17 e-mail, the Phoenix Police Department assistant chief in charge of the Homeland Security Division, Tracy Montgomery, asked another officer to “gather intel” from “folks monitoring social media, and any other intel streams and give an update on our potential for ongoing ‘Occupy’ protests this week” and insisted on figuring out a “plan for monitoring these individuals long term.”
The long-term monitoring meant police were watching Occupy Phoenix members’ Facebook conversations and personal social media use well into 2012.
One member of the Phoenix Police Department seemed to do little else during the fall of 2011 and much of 2012 besides keeping tabs on Occupy Phoenix. Brenda Dowhan is with the department’s Homeland Defense Bureau and serves as a Terrorism Liaison All-Hazards intelligence analyst with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. Much of her work involved the monitoring of social media sites such as Facebook to track individuals connected to Occupy Phoenix. She distributed the information she gathered to other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
“Tracking the activities of Occupy Phoenix is one of my daily responsibilities,” Dowhan wrote in one e-mail to FBI agent Alan McHugh. “My primary role is to look at the social media, websites, and blogs. I just wanted to put it out there so that if you would like me to share with you or you have something to share, we can collaborate.”
During the October 2011 events, she drafted alerts to Downtown Phoenix Partnership Members and advised other business members to contact police if they experienced “problems with demonstrators.”
When a Mesa detective told her that a Mesa city councilmember had said that he had been invited to join a Bank of America protest by members of Occupy Phoenix, Dowhan alerted other officers at the Phoenix Police Department and at the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center.
On November 3, 2011, the Mesa Police Department’s Intelligence and Counter Terrorism Unit issued a bulletin on “Bank Transfer Day,” the nationwide effort by the Occupy movement to get people to withdraw funds from the giant banks. O’Neill contacted Dowhan and asked whether there was “anything downtown banks need to know that would be more beneficial.” Dowhan responded: “Occupy Phoenix just updated their page saying that they will be marching to Wells Fargo, B of A [Bank of America], and Chase Tower. They are supposed to hold a ‘credit card shredding ceremony,’ but we haven’t identified which bank they will be doing that at. We will have to monitor their FB [Facebook].”
To facilitate Dowhan’s work, other Phoenix police officers regularly fed her logs containing the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, physical descriptions, driver’s licenses, and home addresses of citizens arrested, issued citations, or even given warnings by police in connection with Occupy Phoenix.
Dowhan also used facial recognition technology to try to identify individuals believed to be involved with the Occupy group. Dowhan grabbed photographs of activists on Facebook and then ran them through their facial recognition system.
Here is one example of the use of facial recognition. On November 18, 2011, the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center got an anonymous tip about an “Occupy nut” who was allegedly making vague violent threats. “Since I’m aware no crime has technically been committed,” the tipster wrote, “I’ve got an actual crime for you as well: illegal possession/use of marijuana. I’ve seen her smoking it on camera. I will attempt to get a picture in the future.” The tipster proceeded to get a photograph of the activist at her computer.
Dowhan tried to take it from there. “We have a Facebook photo and tried to do facial recognition, but she was wearing glasses,” wrote Dowhan in a December 23 e-mail.
Dowhan didn’t confine herself to Arizona. She compiled a spreadsheet from data supplied by thirty-one fusion centers from around the country of the emerging Occupy movement in fifty cities and twenty-six states. Whatever the excitement this work might generate for a busybody like Dowhan, a summary of that report noted that “the vast majority of the participants have been peaceful, cooperative, and law abiding.”
One citizen who complained about the Phoenix Police Department’s crackdown on Occupy immediately became a subject of inquiry by the department. On December 14, 2011, a concerned citizen by the name of David Mullin wrote an e-mail to the department.
“Dear Sir or Madam,” the e-mail began. “Please consider leaving the Occupy movement alone. They speak for me and I suspect a large portion of America who are upset with corporate greed and the ability to purchase politicians and their votes. We are going to take America back for its citizens, and it would probably be better for your careers not to get in the way. Thanks, David Mullin.”
Mullin was apparently reacting to a police raid on Occupy Phoenix’s small camp in Cesar Chavez Plaza on December 8, when police arrested six activists on charges of violating the city’s “urban camping” ordinance.
Within minutes of sending his e-mail, Mullin caught the attention of the Phoenix Police Department’s assistant chief in charge of the Homeland Security Division, Tracy Montgomery, who wrote in an e-mail: “Interesting e-mail threatening our careers. Anyone know the name?”
That very evening, the department’s Homeland Defense Bureau commander, Geary Brase, told Lieutenant Lawrence Hein to have someone check out the e-mail. That someone was Dowhan.
At 6:51 the next morning, Dowhan e-mailed a link to Mullin’s Facebook page to Hein. One fellow officer sent Dowhan a note of congratulation: “Great work Brenda!”
As she continued her spy work, Dowhan became concerned that she might be detected online and asked her superiors if they could get her a “clean computer,” possibly one with an “anonymizer.”
Meanwhile, Dowhan’s undercover colleague, Saul DeLara, was having a harder time remaining anonymous.
In July 2011, a Phoenix-area activist, Ian Fecke-Stoudt, mentioned that “a creepy guy who looked like he was probably a cop” had been hanging around Conspire, a coffeehouse in downtown Phoenix. (In 2010, it won the title of “Best Hangout for Anarchists, Revolutionaries, and Dreamers” by the Phoenix New Times but has since gone out of business.)
According to Fecke-Stoudt, the man was clean-cut and middle-aged. He introduced himself as “Saul DeLara.” Despite a fit appearance, he claimed to be homeless — and commented frequently on trouble he had had with police during his life on the street. He said he was a native of Juarez, Mexico, but seldom disclosed any other details of his personal life other than to mention that he had ties to anarchists there.
In an October 3 e-mail, Sergeant Van Dorn of the department’s Major Offender Program wrote that “Saul attended the ‘#OccupyPhoenix’ meeting at Conspire on 10/2.” Van Dorn circulated DeLara’s notes of items from the meeting. One item the activists mentioned was “working with police.” They even discussed making “You are one of us signs.” In a November 3 e-mail, Van Dorn wrote: “Saul will be spending today and tomorrow hanging out in the Plaza and with the Anarchists to try and gather additional information.”
DeLara continued to inform on Phoenix activists until November 9, 2011. In his final month, much of his attention was centered on a pending protest against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That protest, which occurred on November 30, took place outside the gates of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa in Scottsdale, where ALEC was holding its States and Nation Policy Summit.
ALEC claims to have 2,000 state lawmakers as members, who meet with representatives from the nation’s leading corporations and conservative think tanks to come up with “model” legislation. It has sparked criticism in recent years for disseminating voter ID bills and especially “Stand Your Ground” legislation, which created a controversy following the 2012 shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.
In Arizona, activists denounced ALEC for promoting the “No More Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act.” The nation’s leading operator of for-profit prisons and immigrant detention facilities — Corrections Corporation of America — was a longstanding member and underwriter of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force. The second and third largest private prison and detention center operators — the Geo Group and the Management and Training Corporation — also have had ALEC ties.
And so, when law enforcement got wind of the ALEC protest, it sent Saul on a mission.
An e-mail to police higher ups about that meeting stated: “Bosses: Saul attended an organizational meeting for the disrupt ALEC movement last night at [redacted]. The flyers they handed out for upcoming meetings, locations, and planned events can all be found on their website…. Members of the Occupy movement are joining in the effort to protest and disrupt at the ALEC conference as well. Information to follow on their FB [Facebook] page soon…. Because ALEC helped write/sponsor SB1070, the Hispanic community is joining in on the efforts as well…. In addition to the Kierland Resort several other locations are being targeted for disruption and are listed on the above website.”
Members of the Phoenix Police Department met with the head of security for the Westin Kierland at the Arizona fusion center to go over the upcoming ALEC protest. And the Phoenix Police Department came up with a “Face Sheet” about activists involved in the planning for the ALEC protest. Fecke-Stoudt was on it, with his driver’s license photo. So too was Jason Ohdner, a Quaker street medic who was present at the November 9 ALEC protest meeting.
But DeLara’s time as an infiltrator was up. After the meeting, an immigrants’ rights activist approached him and confronted him about his life as a cop. According to the activist, she had worked as a barista at a Phoenix Starbucks years ago that DeLara often patronized. When she confronted him, DeLara denied having ever seen her before and angrily denied being a cop. Nevertheless, word of DeLara’s law enforcement background spread, blowing his cover. While he was at it, though, he rubbed elbows not only with members of Occupy Phoenix and the ALEC protesters but also with faith-based organizations and immigrant and indigenous rights groups.
Here is the response the Phoenix Police Department gave me to questions I asked about DeLara and its tracking of the Occupy movement.
“Occupy presented itself with a great deal of civil unrest over a long period of time,” wrote Sergeant Trent Crump in an e-mail to me. “We monitored available Intel during that time, as it is used for Intel-driven policing. Intel dictated resources and response tactics to address, mitigate, and manage the ongoing activity, which was fluid and changing day to day. This approach ensured that citizens could exercise their rights, but with our efforts of protecting the community and their property at the same time. I will not confirm any information about a possible plainclothes or undercover officer of this department.”
The Arizona fusion center’s and the Phoenix Police Department’s obsession with the Occupy movement and the ALEC protest led them to monitor a visit by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. He was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the “We Are One” conference on December 2, 2011. It was sponsored by the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and numerous other labor and civil rights groups.
Phoenix police officers working with the fusion center noted that Jackson got to town early and met with members of Occupy Phoenix on November 30.
“At approximately 2100 hour, Jessie [sic] Jackson and a few staff members arrived at the protest and spoke with demonstrators,” an internal police department e-mail states. “He stayed for a little more than an hour, and a couple of media outlets arrived and filmed the visit.”
The police department’s counter-terrorism officers were concerned that Jackson was also going to join the ALEC protests and participate in an Occupy Phoenix march to the offices of Freeport-McMoRan. (Freeport-McMoRan served as a sponsor for the ALEC State and Nation Policy Summit.)
Jackson did go to those events. When the crowd got to the Freeport-McMoRan building, Jackson said, “We are the people who care about and love this country,” according to the Downtown Devil, a student newspaper of Arizona State University’s Phoenix campus. “March on day after day until there is justice and love and healing in the land.” The march headed to Cesar Chavez Plaza, where Jackson added: “Occupy is a spirit — a spirit of patriotism and democracy. That spirit cannot be jailed or pepper-sprayed.”
The intrusive and ridiculously wasteful anti-terrorism effort in Phoenix is just one snapshot in a huge album of information that DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy have uncovered about law enforcement and counterterrorism resources being used to track peaceful protesters. According to the documents, police departments around the country, along with the FBI, were monitoring the Occupy movement.
They also were coordinating their responses. On October 11, 2011, “representatives from thirteen police agencies took part in a telephone conference to address shared concerns” about “the growing protests,” said one e-mail circulating in the Phoenix Police Department. “The conference call ended with the understanding of continued efforts by all agencies involved to work together to come up with effective strategies to address issues that arise from the Occupy Wall Street protests in future days and weeks.”
And the documents reveal that law enforcement, from Homeland Security and the U.S. Capitol Police Office of Intelligence Analysis down to the Phoenix Police Department, monitored activists who opposed the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the President the right to toss any person into jail and deprive that person of due process.
The documents obtained by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy jibe with other evidence about the role of Homeland Security, the FBI, and local law enforcement in tracking the Occupy movement and other leftwing activism.
An early April release of government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund shows that Homeland Security included in its daily intelligence briefing a report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations.” Their documents note that the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential terrorist threat. They show Homeland Security surveillance of protests in Asheville, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Jacksonville, Jersey City, Lincoln, Miami, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City.
What emerges is a “disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.
Other bits of the story have come from various news organizations, including WikiLeaks. In February of 2012, it released a Department of Homeland Security document, dated October 2011, that was entitled “Special Coverage: Occupy Wall Street.” The first sentence, in bold, reads: “Mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas. Large scale demonstrations also carry the potential for violence, presenting a significant challenge for law enforcement.”
It noted “the peaceful nature of the protests,” but warned that “the growing support for the OWS movement has … increased the potential for violence.” The document, first reported on by Rolling Stone, concluded that “heightened and continuous situational awareness” was required.
The surveillance of the Occupy movement is part of an alarming pattern of infringement of Americans’ civil liberties since 9/11. Law enforcement agents from campus police all the way up to the National Guard and the Pentagon have gotten into the act, treating lawful political protest as tantamount to terrorism. The creation of Joint Terrorism Task Forces and fusion centers has spawned the widespread sharing of personal information on perfectly innocent demonstrators. The close relationship between these law enforcement groups and the private sector (as well as the FBI-business association Infragard) has blurred their allegiances.
Fusion centers, in particular, have become founts of faulty information. An October 2012 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs concluded that “fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” In fact, in the thirteen-month period that the committee studied fusion centers, it concluded that it “could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat.”
Matthew Rothschild is editor of The Progressive. Read the full DBA Press/Center for Media and Democracy report on Sourcewatch: http://ows.sourcewatch.org. And read the full report and view the document archive on DBA Press: http://dbapress.com/dissent-or-terror.
By MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD on May 20, 2013
(Editor’s Note: This article is derived from research and writing conducted by Beau Hodai, published by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy in the report “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”)
Find this story at 20 May 2013
© 2014 • The Progressive Inc.
Leaked documents show how three large British companies have been paying private security firm to monitor activists
Three large energy companies have been carrying out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists, the Guardian can reveal.
The energy giant E.ON, Britain’s second-biggest coal producer Scottish Resources Group and Scottish Power, one of the UK’s largest electricity-generators, have been paying for the services of a private security firm that has been secretly monitoring activists.
Leaked documents show how the security firm’s owner, Rebecca Todd, tipped off company executives about environmentalists’ plans after snooping on their emails. She is also shown instructing an agent to attend campaign meetings and coaching him on how to ingratiate himself with activists. The disclosures come as police chiefs, on the defensive over damaging revelations of undercover police officers in the protest movement, privately claim that there are more corporate spies in protest groups than undercover police officers.
Senior police officers complain that spies hired by commercial firms are – unlike their own agents – barely regulated.
Sir Hugh Orde, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, which until recently ran the secretive national unit of undercover police officers deployed in protest groups, said in a speech last week that “the deployment by completely uncontrolled and unrestrained players in the private sector” constituted a “massive area of concern”.
Revelations about Mark Kennedy and three other undercover police officers in protest groups caused a furore last month and led to four official inquiries into their activities.
Now a Guardian investigation has shed new light on the surveillance of green campaigners by private security firms whose intrusive operations include posing as activists on mailing lists and infiltrating full-time agents into campaign groups over many years.
Multinational companies, ranging from power producers to arms sellers, hire these firms to try to prevent activists running campaigns against them or breaking into their sites.
The leaked documents lay bare the methods of one firm, Vericola, run by 33-year-old Todd. Based in Canterbury, Vericola, according to Todd, is a “business risk management company” offering a “bespoke” service to clients “regarding potential threats” to their businesses.
Over the past three years, Todd, using different email addresses, has signed up to the mailing lists of a series of environ-mental groups organising major demonstrations such as the G20 rallies in London, demonstrations against E.ON’s Kingsnorth power station and the expansion of Heathrow airport, giving her access to communications and advanced notice of demonstrations.
Last July, she forwarded details about Climate Camp campaigners to two company directors she called “the usual suspects”.
One was Gordon Irving, the security director of Scottish Power since 2001 after spending 30 years in Strathclyde police force. The other was Alan Somerville, then a director of Scottish Resources Group which produces a large amount of Britain’s coal.
Todd highlighted a call from campaigners to submit more objections to coal-producing developments which needed planning permission.
Activists say she regularly attended meetings of an environmental group, known as Rising Tide, for around a year in 2007/08.
The documents also show her advising a colleague on how to fit in with the other activists at meetings held to organise future protests. One tip was that he should not mention he was flying to Germany as “obviously” the environmentalists “hate short-haul flights”.
Todd, who says she is not a corporate spy, told the Guardian that all the information she acquires comes from public sources such as subscribing to emailing lists through the websites of the environmental groups.
Despite emails revealing how she repeatedly tried to find ways for her agents to access protest gatherings, Todd denied her company “infiltrates” meetings of protest groups as they are open to any member of the public.
The environmental activists are angry that, by posing as a supporter, she has gained access to emails and meetings where tactics and strategies are discussed. Eli Wilton, a Climate Camp organiser, said: “It’s frightening that in a meeting about how to stop the fossil fuel industry, the person sitting next to you might be a spy paid for by the energy giants themselves.”
He said Todd and her colleagues “couldn’t have gotten subscribed without attending our meetings. These were internal lists where, for example, we strategised about how to stop new coal-fired power stations being built by E.ON.”
E.ON said it had hired Vericola and another security firm, Global Open, on an “ad hoc” basis as its executives wanted to know when environmentalists were going to demonstrate at or invade its power stations and other premises, as they had done in the past.
The E.ON spokesman said it asked Vericola only for publicly available information and if Todd and her colleagues had obtained private information, they had done so “under their own steam”.
SRG and Scottish Power did not comment.
Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
Monday 14 February 2011 21.00 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 20 May 2014 07.51 BST
Find this story at 14 February 2011
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent
It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations’ knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).
As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI – though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization – nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a “terrorist threat”:
“FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.”
Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:
“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a “Bank Fraud Working Group” met in November 2011 – during the Occupy protests – to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its “domestic terrorism” unit. The Anchorage, Alaska “terrorism task force” was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Mississippi “joint terrorism task force” was issuing a “counterterrorism preparedness alert” about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Mississippi, the FBI and the “Bank Security Group” – multiple private banks – met to discuss the reaction to “National Bad Bank Sit-in Day” (the response was violent, as you may recall). The Virginia FBI sent that state’s Occupy members’ details to the Virginia terrorism fusion center. The Memphis FBI tracked OWS under its “joint terrorism task force” aegis, too. And so on, for over 100 pages.
Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, who has sought similar documents for more than a year, reported that the FBI falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall Street existed at all. But the release may be strategic: if you are an Occupy activist and see how your information is being sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, not to mention the “longterm plans” of some redacted group to shoot you, this document is quite the deterrent.
There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people’s income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.
Remember that only 10% of the money donated to WikiLeaks can be processed – because of financial sector and DHS-sponsored targeting of PayPal data. With this merger, that crushing of one’s personal or business financial freedom can happen to any of us. How messy, criminalizing and prosecuting dissent. How simple, by contrast, just to label an entity a “terrorist organization” and choke off, disrupt or indict its sources of financing.
Why the huge push for counterterrorism “fusion centers”, the DHS militarizing of police departments, and so on? It was never really about “the terrorists”. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.
• This article originally referred to a joint terrorism task force in Jackson, Michigan. This was amended to Jackson, Mississippi at 4pm ET on 2 January 2012
Naomi Wolf
Saturday 29 December 2012 14.58 GMT Last modified on Friday 10 October 2014 12.01 BST
Find this story at 29 December 2012
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Once-secret documents reveal the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street from its earliest days and treated the nonviolent movement as a potential terrorist threat. Internal government records show Occupy was treated as a potential threat when organizing first began in August of 2011. Counterterrorism agents were used to track Occupy activities, despite the internal acknowledgment that the movement opposed violent tactics. The monitoring expanded across the country as Occupy grew into a national movement, with FBI agents sharing information with businesses, local police agencies and universities. We’re joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the FBI documents through the Freedom of Information Act. “We can see, decade after decade, with each social justice movement, that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people,” Verheyden-Hilliard says. [includes rush transcript]
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin with a look at newly revealed documents that show the FBI monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement from its earliest days last year. Internal government records show Occupy was treated as a potential terrorism threat when organizing first began in August of 2011. Counterterrorism agents were used to track Occupy activities despite the internal acknowledgment that the movement opposed violent tactics. The monitoring expanded across the country as Occupy grew into a national movement, with FBI agents sharing information with businesses, local police agencies and universities. One FBI memo warned that Occupy could prove to be an “outlet” through which activists could exploit “general government dissatisfaction.” Although the documents provide no clear evidence of government infiltration, they do suggest the FBI used information from local law enforcement agencies gathered by someone observing Occupy activists on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: The heavily redacted FBI records were obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request. We invited the FBI to join us on the program to discuss the latest revelations, but they declined. Instead, spokesperson Paul Bresson issued a written statement saying, quote, “The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents.” He also said, quote, “It is law enforcement’s duty to use all lawful tools to protect their communities.”
Well, for more, we’re joined by Mara Verheyden-Hilliard. She’s executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which obtained the documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street, joining us now from Washington, D.C.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mara. Tell us what you found. We’ve got time. Tell us what you found in these documents.
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, the documents, as you stated, show that the FBI and American intelligence agencies were monitoring and reporting on Occupy Wall Street before the first tent even went up in Zuccotti Park. The documents that we have been able to obtain show the FBI communicating with the New York Stock Exchange in August of 2011 about the upcoming Occupy demonstrations, about plans for the protests. It shows them meeting with or communicating with private businesses. And throughout the materials, there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, American intelligence agencies really working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.
AMY GOODMAN: Interesting that they came out on Friday before Christmas?
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, we certainly thought so. We have been trying to get these documents for more than a year. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed original FOIA demands with federal agencies as well as municipalities and police departments all around the United States, and we did so in the fall of 2011, when there was evidence of a coordinated crackdown on Occupy all around the country. And we wanted to get the documents out to be able to show what the government was doing. And the FBI has stonewalled for a year, and we were finally able to get these documents. They came to us, you know, as you said, the Friday before the holiday weekend. And we wanted to get them out to people right away. We assumed the FBI was expecting that, you know, it would just get buried. And instead, I have to say, it was, you know, great to be able to get these up and have people around the United States be able to see what the FBI is doing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And Mara, what about the issue of actual infiltrators, either paid or sent in by law enforcement or the FBI into the Occupy groups?
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, the documents are heavily redacted. There is a lot of material that, on the pages themselves, we cannot see. And the documents also, in terms of the breadth and scope of the production, we believe that there is a lot more that’s being withheld. Even when you go through the text of the documents, you can see that there’s a lot more in terms of meetings and memos that must exist. And we are filing an appeal to demand and fight for more material to be released.
But even in these heavily redacted documents, you can see the FBI using at least private entities as a proxy force for what appears to be infiltration. There is—there are documents that show the Federal Reserve in Richmond was reporting to the FBI, working with the Capitol Police in Virginia, and reporting and giving updates on planning meetings and discussions within the Occupy movement. That would appear, minimally, that they were sending undercovers, if not infiltrators, into those meetings.
There is another document that shows the FBI meeting with private port security officers in Anchorage, Alaska, in advance of the West Coast port actions. And that document has that private port security person saying that they are going to go attend a planning meeting of the demonstrators, and they’re reporting back to the FBI. They coordinate with the FBI. The FBI says that they will put them in touch with someone from the Anchorage Police Department, that that person should take the police department officer with him, as well.
And so these documents also show the intense coordination both with private businesses, with Wall Street, with the banks, and with state police departments and local police departments around the country.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then go specifically to several of the documents you got under the Freedom of Information Act. We’re talking to Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, who is the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which got the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, has been trying to get them over the past few years. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We go back right now to Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which released documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street. I want to turn right now to one of the documents. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. I want to turn to part of a memo dated October 19, 2011, from the FBI’s field office in Jacksonville, Florida. The document is titled, quote, “Domain Program Management Domestic Terrorism.” It shows the FBI was concerned the Occupy movement, quote, “may provide an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.” In particular, the document cites certain areas of concern in Central Florida where, quote, “some of the highest unemployment rates in Florida continue to exist.” Mara, can you talk about this idea of a lone offender threat?
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: I think that that is very much a measure of box checking by the FBI. I don’t believe—and their documents show that they did not believe—that this was a movement that posed a threat of violence. Now, throughout the documents, they’re using their counterterrorism resources and counterterrorism authorities, they are defining the movement as domestic terrorism and potentially criminal in nature. But the fact is, they also throughout the documents say that they know that this is a peaceful movement, that it is organized on a basis of nonviolence. And by that logic, of course, you can investigate everyone in every activity in the United States on the grounds that someone might do something sometime. And, in fact, think about the tea party rallies. The tea party was having rallies all around the United States where their members come carrying weapons—they’re open carrying—including at events where the president of the United States was speaking. But the FBI is turning its attention to this movement.
And when they reference the locations in Florida, I think that’s actually a political analysis, a recognition that this is a movement whose time has come. And whether it’s in hibernation right now, it is based on an organic reality of the economic situation in the United States. And the FBI is referencing the high level of unemployment, the needs that people have, and it’s a recognition, too, of the dynamism and the dynamic nature of the people of the United States, the people all over the world, when they organize and come together. That’s the threat that we believe the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are truly focused on, not a threat of violence.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Mara, I’d like to turn to another document from the FBI’s New York field office that shows FBI personnel met with representatives of the New York Stock Exchange on August 19th, 2011, to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that were set for the following month. The memo describes the meeting, saying, quote, “Discussed was the planned anarchist protest titled ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ scheduled for September 17, 2011. The protest appears on anarchist websites and social network pages on the internet.” The memo goes on to say, quote, “Numerous incidents have occurred in the past which show attempts by anarchist groups to disrupt, influence, and or shut down normal business operations of financial districts.” Talk about these meetings between law enforcement and the parties targeted by Occupy Wall Street, Mara.
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, again, the documents throughout show that they know that the movement is nonviolent. And the FBI routinely uses reference to anarchists and demonizing anarchists or a political ideology as if it’s an—identical with criminal behavior. And so, they often reference anarchists in these materials and other materials that we’ve gotten over the years in our litigation, even where they know there are not acts of violence. And we also know how frequently the police themselves, you know, mask up and infiltrate demonstrate demonstrations, posing themselves as the anarchists that they’re always saying that they’re worried about.
But those documents again show the FBI working with private industry, with the banks. They’re not bringing evidence of real threats of violence. They’re talking about political uprising. And I think we can be sure that if they had evidence of criminal activity, they wouldn’t have redacted it. They would have been happy to produce that. But they don’t have it. And over and over again, you have the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security basically conducting themselves in a form of police statism in the United States against the people of the United States.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the historical precedent here, the history of the FBI’s involvement in monitoring, surveilling and sometimes disrupting peaceful, dissident activity in the United States?
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: Well, exactly. This is just part and parcel of the long history of the FBI. And this is not the first incident, it is not going to be the last, and it’s not the worst, to be honest. We all know that. It’s not—you know, the FBI has a long history — ’50s, ’60s, ’70s — of mass surveillance, of targeting of people based on political ideology, of efforts to disrupt the movements for social justice, for efforts to shut down black liberation movement, the antiwar movement. And in the ’70s, of course, there were these great revelations about the abuses of the FBI, of the CIA, of other security agencies. And there were the Church Committee hearings. There were supposedly protections put in place. But we can see, you know, decade after decade, with each social justice movement, that the FBI conducts itself in the same role over and over again, which is to act really as the secret police of the establishment against the people.
AMY GOODMAN: Mara, a document from October 2011 indicates law enforcement from the Federal Reserve in Richmond, Virginia, was giving the FBI information about Occupy Wall Street. It says the Federal Reserve source contacted the FBI to, quote, “pass on information regarding the movement known as occupy Wall Street.” Interestingly, the memo also notes that Occupy Wall Street, quote, “has been known to be peaceful but demonstrations across the United States show that other groups have joined in such as Day Of Rage and the October 2011 Movement,” it says. The memo describes repeated communications to, quote, “pass on updates of the events and decisions made during the small rallies.” Can you talk about the significance of this document, Mara?
MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: That document is one of the ones that would indicate the FBI was minimally using private entities or local police departments as proxy forces for infiltration, for undercover operations, to monitor, surveil, collect information. And that document, too, and the series of documents also showed the breadth of the reporting. So you have individuals on the ground with the Federal Reserve Bank, with the state police agencies, apparently monitoring and collecting information on the planning discussions of protests in Richmond, reporting them into the FBI and also reporting them into state fusion centers and to other intelligence and domestic terrorism data centers.
Now, the data warehousing in the United States, the mass collection of data on the people of the United States, is of great concern. And you can see, through these documents, the FBI is collecting a lot of information on completely lawful activities, on the activities of people who are not alleged to have committed criminal acts, are not planning criminal acts, who actually are engaged in cherished, First Amendment-protected activities. And yet, it’s being collected under the imprimatur of domestic terrorism or criminal activity and being entered into these mass databases, which have a huge level of dissemination and access and which are virtually unregulated.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, for joining us, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which released the documents showing how the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2012
Find this story at 27 December 2012
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It turns out that all you crazy, post-hippy Occupy Wall Streeters were right: the government does not have your best interest at hearts. In fact, the FBI just released a heavily redacted memo that details some of the ways that it used its anti-terrorism surveillance power to keep last year’s OWS campaign heavily guarded.
Released by the Partnership for Civil Justice after it pursued the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the items included will just serve to (depending on your worldview) reinforce your paranoia American security bureaus having the carte blanche to become Big Brother, or terrify you into validating the belief that those kids with the drums and the dreadlocks were planning another 9/11.
-As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.
Translation: You guys never had a chance. The FBI knew about the plans to occupy Zuccotti Square before most of you did.
-Documents released show coordination between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector,” discussing the OWS protests at the West Coast ports to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report shows the nature of secret collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their corporate clients – the document contains a “handling notice” that the information is “meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…” (The DSAC document was also obtained by the Northern California ACLU which has sought local FBI surveillance files.)
Translation: You want to know how Citibank had the drop on protesters last October? They were tipped off by the FBI/Department of Homeland Security and/or the Domestic Security Alliance Council.
-The Memphis FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss “domestic terrorism” threats, including, “Aryan Nations, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.”
Translation: One of these things is not like the other…
To read the entirety of the document, click here. But don’t even bother clearing your browser history: the FBI already knows you’re reading this article.
By Drew Grant | 12/24/12 12:48pm
Find this story at 24 December 2012
Copyright observer.com
FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) pursuant to the PCJF’s Freedom of Information Act demands reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.
The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.
“This production, which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
“The documents are heavily redacted, and it is clear from the production that the FBI is withholding far more material. We are filing an appeal challenging this response and demanding full disclosure to the public of the records of this operation,” stated Heather Benno, staff attorney with the PCJF.
As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.
The FBI’s Indianapolis division released a “Potential Criminal Activity Alert” on September 15, 2011, even though they acknowledged that no specific protest date had been scheduled in Indiana. The documents show that the Indianapolis division of the FBI was coordinating with “All Indiana State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies,” as well as the “Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center,” the FBI “Directorate of Intelligence” and other national FBI coordinating mechanisms.
Documents show the spying abuses of the FBI’s “Campus Liaison Program” in which the FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to “sixteen (16) different campus police officials,” and then “six (6) additional campus police officials.” Campus officials were in contact with the FBI for information on OWS. A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.
Documents released show coordination between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and corporate America. They include a report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), described by the federal government as “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector,” discussing the OWS protests at the West Coast ports to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report shows the nature of secret collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their corporate clients – the document contains a “handling notice” that the information is “meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…” (The DSAC document was also obtained by the Northern California ACLU which has sought local FBI surveillance files.)
Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to the DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor for the port actions. The NCIS describes itself as “an elite worldwide federal law enforcement organization” whose “mission is to investigate and defeat criminal, terrorist, and foreign intelligence threats to the United States Navy and Marine Corps ashore, afloat and in cyberspace.” The NCIS also assists with the transport of Guantanamo prisoners.
DSAC issued several tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest” which it defines as ranging from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” It advised to dress conservatively, avoid political discussions and “avoid all large gatherings related to civil issues. Even seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity or be met with resistance by security forces. Bystanders may be arrested or harmed by security forces using water cannons, tear gas or other measures to control crowds.”
The FBI in Anchorage reported from a Joint Terrorism Task Force meeting of November 3, 2011, about Occupy activities in Anchorage.
A port Facility Security Officer in Anchorage coordinated with the FBI to attend the meeting of protestors and gain intelligence on the planning of the port actions. He was advised to request the presence of an Anchorage Police Department official to also attend the event. The FBI Special Agent told the undercover private operative that he would notify the Joint Terrorism Task Force and that he would provide a point of contact at the Anchorage Police Department.
The Jacksonville, Florida FBI prepared a Domestic Terrorism briefing on the “spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement” in October 2011. The intelligence meeting discussed Occupy venues identifying “Daytona, Gainesville and Ocala Resident Agency territories as portions …where some of the highest unemployment rates in Florida continue to exist.”
The Tampa, Florida FBI “Domestic Terrorism” liaison participated with the Tampa Police Department’s monthly intelligence meeting in which Occupy Lakeland, Occupy Polk County and Occupy St. Petersburg were discussed. They reported on an individual “leading the Occupy Tampa” and plans for travel to Gainesville for a protest planning meeting, as well as on Veterans for Peace plans to protest at MacDill Air Force Base.
The Federal Reserve in Richmond appears to have had personnel surveilling OWS planning. They were in contact with the FBI in Richmond to “pass on information regarding the movement known as occupy Wall Street.” There were repeated communications “to pass on updates of the events and decisions made during the small rallies and the following information received from the Capital Police Intelligence Unit through JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force).”
The Virginia FBI was collecting intelligence on the OWS movement for dissemination to the Virginia Fusion Center and other Intelligence divisions.
The Milwaukee division of the FBI was coordinating with the Ashwaubenon Public Safety division in Green Bay Wisconsin regarding Occupy.
The Memphis FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss “domestic terrorism” threats, including, “Aryan Nations, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.”
The Birmingham, AL division of the FBI sent communications to HAZMAT teams regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Jackson, Mississippi division of the FBI attended a meeting of the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for “National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day” on December 7, 2011.
The Denver, CO FBI and its Bank Fraud Working Group met and were briefed on Occupy Wall Street in November 2011. Members of the Working Group include private financial institutions and local area law enforcement.
Jackson, MS Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a “Counterterrorism Preparedness” alert. This heavily redacted document includes the description, “To document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.”
You can read the FBI – OWS documents below where we have uploaded them in searchable format for public viewing.
The PCJF filed Freedom of Information Act demands with multiple federal law enforcement agencies in the fall of 2011 as the Occupy crackdown began. The FBI initially attempted to limit its search to only one limited record keeping index. Recognizing this as a common tactic used by the FBI to conduct an inadequate search, the PCJF pressed forward demanding searches be performed of the FBI headquarters as well as FBI field offices nationwide.
The PCJF will continue to push for public disclosure of the government’s spy files and will release documents as they are obtained.
Posted on December 21, 2012
Find this story at 21 December 2012
See the released documents here
Copyright Partnership for Civil Justice
On March 6 members of an off-shoot of Anonymous, Lulzsec, were arrested as a result of an FBI informant, Sabu, whom the media describes as a Lulzsec leader. The six arrests were for people allegedly involved with Lulzsec which became known for targeting Sony, the CIA, the U.S. Senate, and FBI, as well as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal.
Exactly one year ago to the day of the arrests, The Guardian published an article headlined, “One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer.’” The article described how the FBI had used the threat of long sentences to turn some members of Anonymous and similar groups into informants. It also described how the group was open to infiltration. On Democracy Now, Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who is an expert on digital media, hackers and the law, said: “There had been rumors of infiltration or informants. At some level, Anonymous is quite easy to infiltrate, because anyone can sort of join and participate. And so, there had been rumors of this sort of activity happening for quite a long time.”
In Part I of this series, Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Mis-direct are Widespread in Occupy, we described reports of widespread infiltration of the Occupy. In this article we will describe the history of infiltration of political movements in the United States and the goals of infiltration. Part III of this series will describe behavior of infiltrators, how other movements have countered infiltrators and what Occupy can do to minimize the damage from infiltrators.
Infiltration is the Norm, not the Exception, of U.S. Political Movements
When the long history of political infiltration is reviewed, the Occupy Movement should be surprised if it is not infiltrated. Almost every movement in modern history has been infiltrated by police and others using many of the same tactics we are now seeing in Occupy.
Virtually every movement has been the target of police surveillance and disruption activities. The most famous surveillance program was the FBI’s COINTELPRO which according to COINTELPRO Documents targeted the women’s rights, Civil Rights, anti-war and peace movements, the New Left, socialists, communists and independence movement for Puerto Rico, among others. Among the groups infiltrated were the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, Congress for Racial Equality, the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Black Panthers and Weather Underground. Significant leaders from Albert Einstein to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who are both memorialized in Washington, were monitored. The rule in the United States is to be infiltrated; the exception is not to be.
The Church Committee documented a history of use of the FBI for purposes of political repression. They described infiltration efforts going back to World War I, including the 1920s, when agents were charged with rounding up “anarchists and revolutionaries” for deportation. The Church Committee found infiltration efforts growing from 1936 through 1976, with COINTELPRO as the major program. While these domestic political spying and disruption programs were supposed to stop in 1976, in fact they have continued. As reported in “The Price of Dissent,” Federal Magistrate Joan Lefkow found in 1991, the record “shows that despite regulations, orders and consent decrees prohibiting such activities, the FBI had continued to collect information concerning only the exercise of free speech.”
How many agents or infiltrators can we expect to see inside a movement? One of the most notorious “police riots” was the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. Independent journalist Yasha Levine writes: “During the 1968 protests of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which drew about 10,000 protesters and was brutally crushed by the police, 1 out of 6 protesters was a federal undercover agent. That’s right, 1/6th of the total protesting population was made up of spooks drawn from various federal agencies. That’s roughly 1,600 people! The stat came from an Army document obtained by CBS News in 1978, a full decade after the protest took place. According to CBS, the infiltrators were not passive observers, monitoring and relaying information to central command, but were involved in violent confrontations with the police.” [Emphasis in original.]
Peter Camejo, who ran for Governor of California in 2003 as a Green and as Ralph Nader’s vice president in 2004, often told the story about his 1976 presidential campaign. Camejo able to get the FBI in court after finding their offices broken into and suing them over COINTELPRO activities. The judge asked the Special Agent in Charge how many FBI agents worked in Camejo’s presidential campaign; the answer was 66 agents. Camejo estimated he had a campaign staff of about 400 across the country. Once again that would be an infiltration rate of 1 out of 6 people. Camejo discovered that among the agents was his campaign co-chair. He also discovered eavesdropping equipment in his campaign office and documents showing the FBI had followed him since he was a student activist at 18 years old.
The federal infiltration is buttressed by local and state police. Local police infiltrators have a long tradition dating back to the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the 1904 “Italian Squad in New York City. In addition to political activity they were also involved in infiltrations of unions especially around strikes. Common throughout the United States were the so-called “Red Squads” a 1963 report estimated 300,000 officers were involved in surveillance of political activities. These were local police focused on the same types of people as the FBI. Some of their activities included assassinations of political activists.
In fact, a predecessor to the modern Occupy, the Bonus March of 1932 was infiltrated by federal agents. Their focus was on radicals, anarchists and Communists who might be in the movement. The infiltration resulted in greatly exaggerated reports about radicals inside the Bonus encampments, which were primarily made up of veterans and their families that were used to help justify their removal by President Herbert Hoover with military troops acting against veterans under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, assisted by then-colonels Eisenhower and Patton.
Another predecessor to the Occupy, Resurrection City of 1968, a “community of love and brotherhood,” that occupied the Washington, DC mall for four months was organized by the Poor People’s Campaign fulfilling a plan made prior to the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Resurrection City was heavily infiltrated by layers of police including the FBI, military, Park Police, Secret Service and Metropolitan DC police. FBI director Hoover had agents go to press conferences with false media identification, stationed FBI agents around the perimeter of the encampment and authorized an expensive informant program. After the FBI, the most expensive infiltration of Resurrection City was military intelligence which conducted an unlawful surveillance program, intercepting radio transmissions, monitoring radio traffic and intercepting all communications which were then passed on to the FBI, Secret Service, DC police and Park Police. The military also sent fictitious media to press conferences. The Metropolitan DC police “red squad” sent undercover officers into the camp and took mug shots of its members.
Infiltration tactics continue, perhaps have even escalated today. In a recent report the ACLU writes: “Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.” There have also multiple reports of the CIA working with New York City police for years, an activity that is almost certainly illegal.
Not only have budgets increased in the post-911 world, but restrictions on spying have been weakened and court review has become rarer. The government, often with corporate interests, are gathering huge amounts of data on Americans and targeting a wide range of groups and individuals for intelligence gathering and infiltration. The extent of spying is so widespread that it is more than this brief article can examine, but the ACLU provides a state-by-state review.
We will not know the extent of current infiltration and the activities of government agents for quite some time, but in the post-911 world, with record intelligence budgets and a massive new homeland security bureaucracy, spying is very likely more extensive than ever. Add to that the private security of corporations and political organizations tied to the two political parties and the extent of Occupy infiltration is very likely quite extensive.
What Have Been the Goals, Strategies and Tactics of Past Infiltration?
The most common purpose of infiltration is the intelligence function of gathering information, but the goals are commonly more aggressive. Herbert Hoover ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders according to COINTELPRO Documents.
According to, Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond, the goal of COINTELPRO was also to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” groups. FBI field operatives were directed to:
1. Create a negative public image for target groups by surveiling activists and then releasing negative personal information to the public.
2. Break down internal organization by creating conflicts by having agents exacerbate racial tensions, or send anonymous letters to try to create conflicts.
3. Create dissension between groups by spreading rumors that other groups were stealing money.
4. Restrict access to public resources by pressuring non-profit organizations to cut off funding or material support.
5. Restrict the ability to organize protests through agents promoting violence against police during planning and at protests.
6. Restrict the ability of individuals to participate in group activities by character assassinations, false arrests, surveillance.
The COINTELPRO documents disclose numerous cases of the FBI’s intentions to stop the mass protest against the Vietnam War. Many techniques were used to accomplish the assignment. The documents state: “These included promoting splits among antiwar forces, encouraging red-baiting of socialists, and pushing violent confrontations as an alternative to massive, peaceful demonstrations.”
Infiltration to gather intelligence and intentionally disrupt and break up social movements is common in the United States. At this point in history when the degree of wealth inequality has reached such staggering proportions that the richest 400 people have the same wealth as the bottom 154,000,000 people, when unemployment and foreclosures rates are high, when tens of millions can’t afford health care and students can’t afford to go to college, those in power are fearful that the people will rise up. Events of the past year, particularly the Occupy, reveal that this uprising has begun. It is likely that the powerful will use the tools available to stop Occupy, including infiltration to disrupt, divide and misdirect.
In Part III, we will describe common behaviors of infiltrators and how other social movements have tried to minimize the impact of infiltration. We will then examine the basic structure of the Occupy and analyze its strengths and weaknesses in the context of infiltration. Our hope is that this series will lead to a broader discussion within the movement so that efforts can be made to balance the strengths of Occupy with actions necessary to protect the movement from disruption and division.
If you have experience with your Occupy responding to infiltration please send them to research@october2011.org. Experiences that have worked and failed are of interest.
Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are original organizers of OccupyWashington, DC/October2011 and are currently among the organizers of the National Occupation of Washington, DC.
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Global Research, March 13, 2012
Find this story at 13 March 2012
Copyright © 2005-2015 GlobalResearch.ca
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article contained erroneous information about an alleged infiltrator, identified as Michael Stack, who the article said provoked people in the Occupy movement in Washington, D.C., and New York to resist police with force. There was such a person at the Occupy protests, but the authors have informed us that it was not Michael Stack. The article has been edited to correct that error.
This is Part I of a two-part series on infiltration of Occupy and what the movement can do to limit damage by those who seek to cause harm from within. This article describes public reports of infiltration as well as results of a survey and discussions with Occupiers about the issue. The second article will examine the history of political infiltration and steps the movement can take to address it.
As Part II of this discussion will show, infiltration is the norm in political movements in the United States. Occupy has many opponents likely to infiltrate to divide and destroy it beyond the usual law enforcement apparatus. Other detractors include the corporations whose rule Occupy seeks to end; conservative right-wing groups allied with corporate interests; and members of the power structure including nonprofit organizations linked with corporate-funded political parties, especially the Democratic Party, which would like Occupy to be its tea party rather than an independent movement critical of both parties.
On the very first day of the Occupation of Wall Street, we saw infiltration by the police. We were leaving Zuccotti Park and stopped in traffic. We saw the doors of an unmarked van open and in the front seat were two uniformed police officers. Out of the back came two men wearing backpacks, sweatshirts and jeans. They walked into Zuccotti Park and became part of the crowd.
In the first week of the Occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., we saw the impact of right-wing infiltration. A peaceful protest was planned at the drone exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. The plan was for a banner drop and a “die-in” under the drones. But as protesters arrived at the museum, two people ran out in front, threatening the security guards and causing them to pepper-spray protesters and tourists. One of the “protesters” was Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at The American Spectator,wrote a columnbragging about his role as an agent provocateur.
There have been a handful of other reports of infiltration around the country. In Oakland, CopWatch filmedan Oakland police officer infiltrating.
In another video, CopWatch includes audiotape of Oakland’s newly appointed police chief, Howard Jordan, talking about how police departments all over the country infiltrate, not just to monitor protesters but to manipulate and direct them.
There were also reports in Los Angelesof a dozen undercover policebeing in the L.A. encampment before Occupiers were forcibly evicted by the authorities. The raid by the L.A. police was brutaland resulted in mass arrests. Some of those arrested were mistreated in jails. Most of the charges were dropped. Similar pre-raid undercover activities were reported in Nashville, Tenn.
The Los Angeles encampment also had infiltrators from the right-wing group Free Republic, which postedon its Web page a call for infiltrators to block a vote concerning an offer from the city of Los Angeles for virtually free space for Occupy L.A.: “Need LA Freepers to show up to block this vote by the Occupy L.A. General Assembly. How brave are you?” In the end, L.A. Occupy decided not to accept the offer from the city, a decision opposed by some in the encampment.
In New York, there were also reports of infiltration. For example, one protester describedhow undercover agents infiltrated a demonstration at Citibank and were the loudest and most disruptive participants. The protester, after listening to conversations later at a police station, said in an interview: “It was a bit startling how ‘inside’ their information was, how they [undercover agents] were being paid to go to these protests and put us in situations where we’d be arrested and not be able to leave.”
Survey and Interviews of Occupiers Show Common Tactics and Infiltrators
These scattered reports seem to be the tip of the iceberg. As a result of experiencing extreme divisive tactics and character assassination on Freedom Plaza, we began to hear from Occupiers across the country about similar incidents in their encampments. We decided to survey people about infiltration.
Recently we toured occupations on the West Coast, where we spoke to many participants, and have attended General Assemblies at Occupy Wall Street and Philadelphia. We heard stories in Arizona of someone with website administrative privileges deleting the live-stream archive that included video that was to be used in defense of some who were arrested. In Lancaster, Pa., someone took control of the email list, making it an announce-only list, and when the police threatened to close the camp, that person put out a statement that the Lancaster Occupiers had decided to go without any conflict. In fact, no such decision had been made and 30 Occupiers had planned to risk arrest when the police tried to remove them. The false email resulted in no resistance.
Our West Coast trip ended at the Occupy Olympia Solidarity Social Forum. We were able to survey 41 people representing 15 occupations primarily on the West Coast but including Missoula, Mont., and New Orleans. Participants were questioned about 10 behaviors. The most common behaviors, seen in roughly two-thirds of those surveyed and covering 12 of the 15 occupations, were:
1. Disruptions of the General Assemblies and attempts to divide the group. Individuals would interrupt General Assemblies with emergency items or sidetrack the agenda with their personal needs or issues. When proposals were presented to the General Assembly on principles for the occupation or plans to prevent division, individuals would question the authority of the writers of the proposal, launch personal attacks or question their abilities. There were frequent attacks on people who did the most work and were perceived as leaders. The anti-leadership views of many Occupiers were used to essentially attack the most effective people.Sue Baskowrote about this in a comment in Truthdig on a Chris Hedges article in Truthdig. There was an “ongoing campaign of harassment and coercion against the Occupy L.A. participants and volunteers,” Basko wrote. “Each day is a fresh set of victims.” She described the use of Twitter, Listservs and blogs to “defame and harass anyone giving their efforts to help Occupy L.A.” This included attacks on “social media workers, the website team, the lawyers (including me), the medics, the live streamers, the writers and on and on,” she said. She also wrote that “there is the very strong belief that some among them are FBI or DHS [Department of Homeland Security] agents placed there to start the group, egg it on, control it.” Conversations with others in Los Angeles confirmed this report. Our experience in suffering personal attacks included outlandish lies calling us criminals and thieves and near daily email attacks since early December. We found that when we respond and correct lies, it does not stop them and have concluded that if someone has the intention to be a character assassin there is nothing you can do except expose them. Although that may not stop them, it at least gets those in the occupation who are not gullible to doubt the undocumented personal attacks.
2. Individuals who took over the website and/or social media and then removed them or hacked them and took control. As noted above, these networks have been used in personal attacks, as well as to send inaccurate messages to the media and other Occupiers. One mistake is to allow a large number of people to have administrative privileges on the website. Being an administrator allows that person to erase crucial information, as occurred in Phoenix. In Washington, D.C., we have been removed as administrators of a Facebook page we created because we allowed people who turned out to be untrustworthy to have administrative privileges. People can blog or post to Facebook or websites without being administrators.
Division over how money was being spent was an issue reported by 50 percent of respondents, and in 12 out of 15 occupations individuals persistently raised questions about transparency and the use of funds. In General Assemblies in New York and Philadelphia, we saw disruption by people who complained about money issues. In New York, an argument about access to free MetroCards resulted in a 30-minute argument. In Philadelphia, there was a vague complaint centering on the question “Where is the money?” We saw something similar at a 99 percent’s meeting in San Francisco where one of the questioners complained about supposedly missing money. And we have seen still more situations of this kind in Washington, D.C. Sometimes these disrupters seem like homeless or emotionally disturbed individuals. They could be acting out their concerns or they could be encouraged by police to attend meetings to cause disruption and may be paid a small amount to do so. Whether paid or not, the impact is the same—it takes the Occupy off its political agenda and turns people off to participating in the movement.
Finally, the issue of escalation of tactics to include property damage and conflict with police was brought up. The euphemism for this is “diversity of tactics.” In fact, there is great diversitywithin nonviolent tactics. A strong debate exists between those who favor strategic nonviolence and those who favor property destruction and police conflict. In 11 of 15 occupations, there were reports of verbal attacks on police and/or escalation of tactics from nonviolence to property destruction or violence. In one occupation, an individual took over the direct action working group and escalated the tactics used beyond what the group had agreed upon. In another Occupy, the General Assembly approved putting up a structure but agreed that if the police wanted it taken down the protesters would promptly do so to prove that it was temporary. After the structure was put up, a handful of people refused to take it down, causing a 10-hour police conflict and undermining public support for the Occupy. In another occupation, because a minority of the demonstrators refused to adopt nonviolent strategies, a protest with the teachers union was canceled, preventing a major opportunity to expand the movement. When it comes to the issue of violence versus property damage, it is particularly hard to tell whether the differences are political or instigated by infiltrators.
Participants were asked about attempts at co-optation by law enforcement, individuals or organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party and about suspected infiltration by right-wing groups. Eight of the 15 occupations (41 percent of respondents) reported Democratic groups attempted to co-opt them, using the demonstrations to push or prevent a legislative agenda or using their social media to change the times of protests or meetings. Far fewer reported suspicion or evidence of right-wing infiltration (12 percent of respondents in four occupations), most stating that the corporate media provided poor or misleading coverage. The most common form of infiltration was by law enforcement agencies (49 percent of respondents, 11 of 15 occupations). Some respondents reported having video evidence; some reported law enforcement officers having more information than they had been given—such as police using names of Occupiers when names had never been provided; and some suspected police infiltration but had no proof.
Of course, there is a lot of suspicion, but people are rarely able to prove infiltration. These incidents could be the work of people with real political disagreement within the Occupy, or the work of people who are emotionally disturbed or mentally ill or who bring other personal challenges with them. Or, the incidents could be the result of infiltrators manipulating such people, playing on their fears and prejudices. This is not a simple issue, as we will discuss in Part II. It is best to judge people by their actions and not label them as infiltrators without direct proof.
Some may wonder why Democrats or groups closely affiliated with the Democrats, such as MoveOn.org, Campaign for America’s Future, Rebuild the Dream or unions like the SEIU, would want to infiltrate the Occupy. (Note: Individuals who are Democrats or members of a union, MoveOn or other groups are not the same as the leadership.) Essentially, leaders of these groups see Occupy as the Democrats’ potential answer to the tea party. Occupiers do not see themselves that way, but these groups want the movement to adopt their strategy of working within the Democratic Party. In one example, Eric Lotke, a senior policy analyst for SEIU who has been involved in Occupy D.C., appeared on a radio showwith two other Occupiers from the Washington, D.C., and Oakland demonstrations. Lotke said he was speaking as an Occupier from D.C. and talked about “taking back Congress in 2012” and the need for an electoral strategy and gave the usual Democratic rhetoric about President Obama needing more time. The two other guests said Lotke was completely out of step with most Occupiers, who say we should not focus on electoral politics but instead should build an independent movement to challenge the corrupt system. We doubt the Occupy D.C. General Assembly members agreed with Lotke’s pro-Democratic Party, pro-Obama views, but he had positioned himself to speak for them. Van Jonesof Rebuild the Dream similarly was appearing in the media as if he were an Occupy spokesperson, claiming there will be 2,000 “99 percent candidates” in 2012, again trying to push Occupy into Democratic electoral politics. These are just two examples of many Democratic Party operatives trying to drag Occupy into their politics despite the movement consistently describing itself as independent and non-electoral.
We have seen some Occupiers attacking the National Occupation of Washington, DC,scheduled to begin March 30, while other Occupiers have shown enthusiasm for it. Solidarity with NOW DC has been shown by 19 General Assemblies of occupations around the country. InterOccupyclassifies it as a national event. The attackers have been criticizing NOW DC by finding fault with the authors of this article. This criticism is occurring at the same time that Democratic Party-aligned groups have announced their own project—“99%’s Spring”—that will take place at the same time as NOW DC. Thus far the dividers have succeeded in preventing solidarity between the two D.C. occupations and the rest of the Occupy movement. Is the timing a coincidence?
No doubt the information in this article is incomplete. We have been able to survey and talk with people at only about 20 Occupies. We would very much like to hear from others about experiences at their occupation, as understanding these tactics is the first step in confronting and addressing them. (Send your comments to research@october2011.org.)
In Part II of this series, we will focus on the history of government infiltration and the destruction of political movements and political leaders. We will also examine steps that can be taken to minimize the damage from these tactics. One thing evident from the history: Infiltration has been common in political movements for centuries, as have divisive methods, attacks on leaders, escalation of tactics, fights over money and misinformation disseminated to the public.
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese were among the original organizers of Occupy Washington, DC, and are now helping with the National Occupation of Washington, DC.
Find this story at 24 February 2012
AP / Carolyn Kaster
A “V for Vendetta” mask, one of the symbols of the Occupy movement, adorns the statue of Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson on Feb. 1 in McPherson Square in Washington, where Occupy D.C. protesters camped.
Undercover (Guardian Books, 2013) tells the story of the London Metropolitan Police Special Demonstration Squad and its mission to monitor activists and protest movements. Authors Rob Evans and Paul Lewis present an enthralling and disturbing account of police infiltrations in the UK by chronicling nine people who worked as undercover agents in the activist scene from 1983 through 2010. These police spies took on false identities in order to live among activists for years at a time. They did not only keep tabs on activists, they were active participants in groups and often incited others to take radical – and at times illegal – action. Additional police spies have been unmasked since the book was published, yet the practice of surveillance of activist groups continues.
As current debates weigh the merits and rights-infringements of widespread surveillance to combat terrorism, Undercover reminds readers that spying on people who are considered to be subversive is a centuries-old state policy, even when the definition of “subversion” has always been nebulous. “Over the years, Special Branch had spied on suffragettes, pacifists, unemployed workers, striking trade unionists, anti-nuclear activists, anti-war campaigners, fascists, anarchists, and communists.” (p.22) The Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) at the centre of the book was created in 1968 with the stated purpose of providing intelligence in order to prepare an “appropriate” police response to public demonstrations, yet its mission quickly drifted into building files on activists in case they have contact with “individuals police deem to be extremists – or even, perhaps, one day become extremists themselves.” (p.205) Similar tactics have been documented in the United States, where “virtually every movement has been the target of police surveillance and disruption activities.”
Evans and Lewis expose the policies and behaviours of police infiltrators that violate civil rights, are often illegal, and demonstrate patterns of targeting and exploiting women activists. Reading the book from the perspective of a long-time activist has raised several questions about how I view my own activism and contact with the state. While I have been increasingly troubled by the possibility that my email and social media are being tracked by the state, it is much more confronting to consider that I might have direct contact with a police spy. Although Evans and Lewis focus on the UK’s SDS, infiltrations by the police and secret services are common throughout the world. Many organizations and movements in the US have been infiltrated and seeded with informants, and in fact one of the main spies profiled in Undercover, Mark Kennedy, was sent to 11 countries on 40 occasions (including the US), coordinating with secret services and police forces while “infiltrating almost every major anti-capitalist and environmental protest” in Europe (p.4) For this reason, Undercover is essential reading for activists worldwide; learning how infiltrators operate and how they have been unmasked can be helpful in protecting our sisters and brothers, our organizations, and our movements.
Gateway activists and organizations
What struck me most from reading Undercover was the infiltrators’ use of non-threatening groups as entry points to get closer to those they consider to be more radical targets. For example, in order to infiltrate the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the mid-1980s, police spy Bob Lambert first infiltrated groups and joined protests that were not particularly hard-core. “After establishing himself among more moderate activists, Lambert set out befriending campaigners suspected of being in the ALF.” (p.34) This tactic was used by most of the agents described in the book and has been similarly used by infiltrators in the United States. FBI informant “Anna” made her way into the Earth Liberation Front by attending mass public demonstrations during a 2004 G8 meeting in Atlanta and was eventually responsible for the 2007 conviction of activist Eric McDavid, who was sentenced to almost 20 years on domestic terrorism charges.
I have always assumed that my activism would not be very interesting to the police or the secret service, and I have at times dismissed fellow activists who raised questions about possible infiltrations. It felt like over-stating the significance of our actions to consider the possibility of having police spies in our midst. Now, however, I am re-thinking my attitudes – that I have nothing to hide, that what I do is harmless anyway, and that anyone who shows up for the cause is worthy of trust. Not so much because I believe I am a target for my activism but rather that I can be a target for my contacts, that I can be a pawn in the spy game. I’ve had a similar change of heart about social media, its potential for mapping relationships and the possibility that my posts can put my contacts at risk. While I could not imagine that mapping my moves could be at all of interest to the police, I now wonder whether mapping my friends through my moves (in combination with other maps) could put them in danger. The current concerns about mass surveillance have much in common with the SDS mission exposed in Undercover: the state seeks to gather information about as many activists as possible, map out who’s connected to whom, and identify the weak links that can be manipulated. All this in the name of uncovering extremists, even though the results are highly questionable, particularly when infiltrators are agitating (entrapping?) seemingly moderate activists into taking radical action.
Exploiting romantic relationships with activists
A key chapter in Undercover begins with this sentence: “If there was one tactic that was the signature of the Special Demonstration Squad, it was the use of long-term relationships with women activists who could help give undercover operatives the credibility they needed.” (p. 176) Most of the police spies profiled in the book became romantically involved with women activists. Mark Kennedy, whose unmasking in 2010 caused the scandal that led to the book, had multiple sexual encounters as well as 2 long-term relationships with women activists, one of which lasted 6 years. Bob Lambert had four sexual relationships while undercover; he fathered a baby with one woman and used another as his exit strategy to abandon mother and child.
“Alison”, described in Undercover as a “peaceful anti-racist campaigner”, spent years searching for her boyfriend who had disappeared. She eventually concluded that he was an undercover agent, receiving confirmation 10 years later by Evans and Lewis. When thinking about the police spy’s motives, “Alison” felt that she had “inadvertently provided him with ‘an excellent cover story… The level to which he was integrated into my family life meant that people trusted me, people knew that I was who I said I was, and people believed, therefore, that he must be who he said he was…’” (p. 186) She and other women who were caught up in these situations have justifiably suffered greatly from the emotional toll of learning that their intimate relationships were a lie, and that they had been used as a prop in the make-believe activist play.
Although the only woman police spy profiled in Undercover did not become romantically involved with any of the activists, it is not a method used exclusively by men. As was recently reported by The Guardian, “Anna” in the United States seduced her target Eric McDavid and “might have entrapped her prey by encouraging him to behave conspiratorially in the hope of romantic fulfilment.”
The actions of the SDS agents, however, went beyond flirting with women activists. Most concerning is the long-term nature of the relationships they engaged in, the level of intimacy and the depth of the lies. There are 2 cases of police spies having children with women activists named in Undercover. The men did not legally recognize the babies, and indeed they could not since they were living under false identities and had wives and children in their real lives. Neither spy faced any consequences for their actions, and in fact both officers were promoted and continued highly praised careers in the police. In a chapter called “Fatherhood” Evans and Lewis detail how Bob Lambert abandoned his 3-year old son and his activist girlfriend, who only learned the real identity of her son’s father 25 years later. The police spy that seduced “Alison” was simultaneously going to couples’ therapy with his wife to resolve marital problems while at the same time his undercover persona was going to couples’ therapy with “Alison” to reconcile their disagreement about wanting children (he didn’t want them, she did). “The SDS officer had two separate, and totally different lives, with two strained relationships, and two counsellors.” (p. 184)
The police spies’ exit strategy of suddenly disappearing and never being heard from again was heart-breaking for the women with whom they had become involved. Helen Steel describes her reaction to finding out the man she had been in love with did not actually exist: “This was a man I had known for five years, who I had lived with for two years. How could I trust anybody again? I don’t even know the name of the person I had been in a relationship with.” (p. 179) In 2011, eight women deceived into long term intimate relationships with undercover police officers who were infiltrating environmental and social justice campaign groups took legal action against the Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers, “assert[ing] that the actions of the undercover officers breached their rights as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights…”
The pattern of using women activists that is exposed in Undercover shows a systemic misogynist attitude by the police. It is part of the macho personas that the infiltrators take on as a way of demonstrating they are “serious” about hard-core action, in order to gain entry into the supposedly radical scene or, as has been demonstrated, to agitate activists towards radical (illegal) action. An example from the US is FBI informant Brandon Darby, who is responsible for the conviction of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, two activists accused of being in possession of Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican National Convention. Darby had made contact with the activists in Texas months prior to traveling with them to Minnesota for the Convention. During early encounters, Darby met the activists to discuss actions at the Convention and later reported to his FBI handlers: “I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren’t going to be able to fight anybody until they did so.” The film Better This World presents court transcripts and FBI documents including Darby’s emails to make the case for Darby’s role as an agitator who goaded the activists into acts that would be considered as domestic terrorism. This was Darby’s response when questioned about the incident during a Mother Jones interview: “Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs.”
An essay published by Make/Shift magazine in the US uses the example of Darby to explore the link between gender violence and police infiltration. Author Courtney Desiree Morris discusses the surprise among long-time activists to learn that Darby was an informant, particularly since he was a well-known and trusted activist in Austin Texas and New Orleans. However, Darby was also well-known for his aggressive organizing style that drove away women activists. “There were even claims of Darby sexually assaulting female organizers at Common Ground [in New Orleans] and in general being dismissive of women working in the organization.” The argument made in the Make/Shift article centres on infiltrators’ conscious use of power dynamics to destabilize radical movements, proposing that “[m]aybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles.” This certainly sounds applicable for several of the police spies featured in Undercover.
Coordination and collusion with corporate targets
Another troubling and important issue raised in Undercover is the coordination between the police and the corporations against which activists campaign. Many of the undercover agents profiled by Evans and Lewis infiltrated groups denouncing corporate power – from the military industrial complex to corporate-led globalization. This raises the question of which interests were the police truly protecting – those of public safety or corporate control? Most notably, the McLibel case demonstrates the unified interests between corporations and the state, particularly when it came to surveillance of activists.
The McLibel case was a legal battle between McDonald’s and activists in the UK that began in the mid-1980’s when an activist group named London Greenpeace produced a flyer exposing McDonald’s practices in relation to the environment, worker justice, and animal rights. The company took legal action claiming libel; under the UK’s defamation laws it was up to the defendants to prove that they had not committed libel. Several groups and media outlets decided to settle out of court, apologizing for having criticized McDonalds. Five activists from London Greenpeace were singled out in 1990; three eventually apologized but two refused to give in. A court case lasted from 1994 to 1996, with McDonalds spending £10 million on lawyers while the activists sold t-shirts and took up donations to cover their legal costs, raising £35,000. I’ve had my red “McLibel” t-shirt for 20 years, the yellow letters fading but still clearly read “McHunger, McMurder, McGarbage…” Although I was familiar with the campaign, it was only when reading Undercover that I learned how deeply infiltrated the group responsible for the “libellous” flyer was.
As described in Undercover, London Greenpeace “was one of the most spied-upon political groups in modern history.” (p. 66) State infiltrators met agents from 2 different detective agencies hired by McDonald’s (who, by the way, didn’t know about each other). “On at least two occasions, there were as many corporate spies at meetings for the small group as genuine activists.” (p. 71) On the SDS front, Bob Lambert had infiltrated the group in the 1980s and was photographed handing out flyers in front of a McDonald’s store. It is plausible that he would have been involved in drafting the infamous flyer. Later on, John Dines infiltrated the group, becoming its treasurer and engaging in a romantic relationship with Helen Steel. When Helen Steel was named as a co-defendant in the McLibel case, John Dines was perfectly positioned to gather intelligence on the activists’ legal strategy. “It is not known whether intelligence picked up by Dines… was passed on to McDonald’s. However, that seems highly probable. The McLibel trial revealed that Special Branch and McDonald’s were at various points colluding and exchanging information about London Greenpeace.” (p. 76)
While police infiltration and surveillance of activist groups is already alarming, sharing information with corporations (in effect going way beyond their stated mandate to ensure public safety) is even more concerning. Unfortunately the McLibel case is far from an isolated incident, but rather one example in a long history of collaboration between state policing and intelligence agencies and private companies. Current debates about mass surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency has included concerns about the state agency’s relationship with private companies like Google. While these concerns relate to companies giving state spies access to users’ information, surveillance of the Occupy movement show that it is a two-way relationship; here the state was providing information to private companies in order to help them prepare for the demonstrations against them.
In December 2012, the US-based Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) exposed the surveillance of Occupy Wall Street by the FBI, Homeland Security, and other US government agencies. The documents released as a result of a Freedom Of Information request expose the coordination between government agencies and private companies, including proof that the FBI was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy protests as early as August 2011, one month prior to the initial action.
Among the documents released by the FBI was report by the Domestic Security Alliance Council – self-described as a “strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” – that examined the Occupy protests at the West Coast ports. As summarized by PCJF, the “DSAC report shows the nature of secret collaboration between American intelligence agencies and their corporate clients – the document contains a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…”
PCJF Executive director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard was quoted on Democracy Now! that “throughout the materials [released by the FBI], there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, American intelligence agencies really working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.” In that same interview, it is remarked that “you can see the FBI using at least private entities as a proxy force for what appears to be infiltration. … [T]he Federal Reserve in Richmond was reporting to the FBI, working with the Capitol Police in Virginia, and reporting and giving updates on planning meetings and discussions within the Occupy movement. That would appear, minimally, that they were sending undercovers, if not infiltrators, into those meetings.”
Despite acknowledgment that Occupy was a non-violent movement, FBI field offices tracked the protests as they spread through the US and shared information with the protester’s targets. Further research by DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy “demonstrate that law enforcement agencies may be attempting to criminalize thousands of American citizens for simply voicing their disapproval of corporate dominance over our economic and political system.” Writing in the Progressive, Matthew Rothschild states that “the work [the US government’s anti-terrorist apparatus does] in the name of national security advances the interests of some of the largest corporations in America rather than focusing on protecting the United States from actual threats or attacks…” In Arizona, police conducted coordinated online surveillance and infiltration of activist groups including Occupy Phoenix in order to provide intelligence to JP Morgan Chase and other corporations targeted by the activists. One police spy was seen at activists’ meeting spaces as early as July 2011, well before Occupy Phoenix was launched.
Back in the UK, the SDS continued to run into corporate spies long after the McLibel case was over. The landmark case that broke open the story of police infiltrators involved not only SDS officer Mark Kennedy but also private security companies hired by energy company E.ON in order to thwart planned protests at Britain’s biggest coal-fired power stations at Ratcliffe-on-Soar. As reported in The Guardian, leaked documents regarding private surveillance of climate justice activists “come as police chiefs, on the defensive over damaging revelations of undercover police officers in the protest movement, privately claim that there are more corporate spies in protest groups than undercover police officers.”
In conclusion
“They steal identities. They break the law. They sleep with the enemy.” These are the police spies and their systematic violations of rights as documented by Evans and Lewis in Undercover. The book is written by two journalists with great skill at presenting information to the general public. Importantly, it breaks the false dichotomy between “us” and “them” – us activists who are not of interest to the intelligence apparatus and them whose “hard-core behaviour” placed them on police radars. We are all at risk of surveillance for multiple motives: to gain entry into the activist scene, to legitimize their mission, to build as comprehensive a map as possible in order to provide corporations intelligence on the breadth and depth of their adversaries.
While the SDS formally disbanded, state monitoring of activists continues through agencies such as the National Domestic Extremism Unit. As in the US, intelligence-gathering of activists in the UK has evolved into a hybrid of online and offline surveillance. The stories documented in Undercover peaked with Mark Kennedy’s 2010 revelations and the book’s publishing in 2013. However, they remain relevant not only for the repercussions on the people and groups that the SDS manipulated but also because the policy of treating dissent like a crime – and increasingly like terrorism – continues in present day. In order to protect ourselves from police spies, we must understand how they operate and where they come from. This is crucial for all activists, regardless of whether we consider our beliefs and actions to be of interest to the state. For myself, I will be paying closer attention to avoid being a weak link in the surveillance and information chain – to protect myself and those with whom I have contact.
25 maart 2015
Buro Jansen & Janssen
Find this story at 25 March 2015
Exposure of police spy Mark Kennedy revealed a little about international espionage, but much remains hidden
More light has been shed recently on a particularly hidden area of undercover policing. The Mark Kennedy controversy helped to provide a little glimpse of this, but much remains unknown.
During his seven years infiltrating the environmental movement, Kennedy spent quite a lot of time spying on, and disrupting, activists in other countries.
The Channel Four documentary on him called him ’the go-to cop for foreign governments who needed information about their own activists’.
He was deployed in 11 countries on 40 occasions, according to one official report. These countries included Germany, Denmark and Iceland. In Denmark, for instance, he says that he infiltrated a Danish community centre that had housed progressive causes for more than a century, obtaining intelligence to help police storm it and close it down in violent raids.
Mark Jacobs was another of the undercover officers who appears to have engaged in frequent Euro-travel to monitor campaigners.
What has emerged is a highly secretive official apparatus among governments for organising and co-ordinating this cross-border espionage. There appears to be a network of clandestine bodies in which police and governments manage the infiltration and surveillance of political as well as criminal groups.
We would of course be interested in any information on this subject.
Statewatch, which monitors civil liberties in Europe, has recently published this here, noting :”Information currently in the public domain makes up only a small piece of a global puzzle of police working groups and networks dealing with infiltration, intrusion and surveillance not just of criminal groups, but political activists”.
One politician who has pursued this with some vigour is German MP Andrej Hunko. He has recently published a detailed document collating information about these official networks, mainly from official answers in the German Parliament. It can be found here at the end of this document.
Hunko said :”When police forces and intelligence services engage in international cooperation, parliamentary oversight is the loser. The increasing significance of undercover police networks is making this situation far more critical.”
He added that Kennedy’s “infiltration of European leftist movements exemplifies police cooperation conducted beyond the bounds of parliamentary oversight. It remains unclear under whose orders the undercover investigator was operating during the years of his activity.”
He added :”The Icelandic police are stubbornly rejecting requests from the Minister of Justice to release full details of his activity into the public domain, claiming that disclosure would prejudice British security interests. Even though Members of the Icelandic Parliament have a right to ask questions on police matters, they are not being given any information.”
The British government has not disclosed much about these confidential networks either.
Rob Evans
Friday 31 August 2012 15.33 BST Last modified on Wednesday 21 May 2014 08.01 BST
Find this story at 31 August 2012
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
Don’t let the police self-investigations like Operation Herne fool you with their focus on the disbanded Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – this is not a historic problem. The political secret police are still with us says Merrick Godhaven.
The shift from different units leaves us whirling in acronyms. Here, as far as I’m able to tell, is what’s what (corrections welcome!). It’s an alphabet soup of acronyms that swirl before the eyes, so thanks to Jane Lawson for designing the diagram below to make it easier to grasp.
In the beginning
The SDS was a secret unit within Special Branch from 1968 to 2008. Formed as the Special Operations Squad after a demonstration against the Vietnam War kicked off in March 1968, its temporary infiltration was decided to be useful and made permanent at the end of the year. Somewhere in late 1972 or early 1973 it was renamed the Special Demonstration Squad, a moniker it kept until around 1997 when it was renamed the Special Duties Section.
There were other units who amassed and collated intelligence from the SDS and other sources.
The Animal Rights National Index (ARNI), had been set up in 1986. It seems that it may have expanded to include activists from other movements. Around the same time the Southern Intelligence Unit (SIU) was based in Wiltshire and, with its Cumbrian sister team the Northern Intelligence Unit (NIU), ran a database of eco protesters, ravers, travellers and free party types. There is some indication of a third unit that focused on hunt saboteurs. These units had no ‘operational role’ of fake-identity spies in the field, they just gathered information and advised police forces.
Now comes the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). Sounds like a cosy staff body, and indeed it was more like that when it was formed in 1948. But in 1997 it became a private company and got itself funding to flog police information. Then it took on running the spy stuff by establishing the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU)
Established in March 1999 the NPOIU was, along with the Terrorism Act 2000, ID cards and detention without trial, part of a raft of New Labour attacks on civil liberties (those who think of state repression as being a right wing tendency should note that the SDS was also founded by a Labour government). Operation Herne, the police’s self-investigation into secret political policing, says that the NPOIU was formed as a reaction to the large 1995 protests against the export of live animals from Shoreham in Sussex.
The running of the NPOIU was given to the Met, and so it was, to all intents and purposes, a unit within the Met’s Special Branch. Although it used serving Met officers for NPOIU spies, because ACPO was (and still is) a private company it was exempt from Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation and so protected even further from public scrutiny.
Like the SDS, the NPOIU was directly funded by the Home Office, which hints at an answer to the big question – who ordered all this spying and authorised its methods?
The NPOIU absorbed SIU/NIU and effectively replaced ARNI running a database of political activists. It also had an ‘operational role,’ that is to say they deployed undercover agents in target groups under the aegis of its Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU). Whilst the SDS was London-based, the CIU officers from the NPOIU went national. The NPOIU was granted a huge budget and began by putting an officer using the stolen identity ‘Rod Richardson’ into a group of anti-capitalist activists in Nottingham.
Within a couple of months of Richardson’s departure in 2003, those activists were joined by Mark Kennedy, aka Mark Stone. It was his exposure by activists in late 2010 that alerted the world to the existence of the political secret police.
For Operation Herne and other inquiries to focus on the long-defunct SDS but leave out the most notorious undercover officer of them all shows how incomplete an SDS-only picture is. Some managers worked for both the SDS and NPOIU, and officers from both units knowingly overlapped in deployments. Whilst SDS and NPOIU officers knew each other, nonetheless there may well have been some rivalry. As the case of ‘Rod Richardson’ shows, the NPOIU wasn’t initially warned against using the woefully anachronistic practice of stealing the identities of dead children.
As an aside, in 2001 the former ARNI boss Rod Leeming left Special Branch to set up a private spy firm Global Open. In early 2010 he head-hunted Mark Kennedy before his police contract had even finished. This indicates that that it’s a fairly standard career path, and suggests such firms are tipped off about officers who are leaving and cold-call them. It seems unlikely that Kennedy was the first one they got. With virtually no oversight or firm rules, private spies can stay in the field indefinitely. Indeed, had Kennedy been smart enough to change his name by deed poll to Mark Stone, he’d have had ID in the right name and would probably still be spying today.Undercover units chart
(Click to enlarge the chart)
The unholy trinity – NPOIU, NETCU and NDET
In 2004 ACPO created a new post, the National Co-ordinator Domestic Extremism, which oversaw both the NPOIU and a new unit, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU). NETCU was established during the drafting of the 2005 amendment Serious Organised Crime and Police Act which made it illegal to ‘interfere with the contractual relations of an animal research organisation’ or to ‘intimidate’ employees of an animal research organisation. Run from Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, NETCU’s remit was defined as ‘prevention’ and it was tasked with helping companies such as Huntingdon Life Sciences frustrate campaigns waged against them by animal rights activists.
NETCU didn’t just advise corporations about threats to their profits from campaigns, it took a proactive political role in discrediting and undermining those campaigns. Its website linked to the pro-vivisection Research Defence Society, and the unit issued several press releases boasting of activists being prevented from doing street collections.
NETCU’s ‘mission-creep’ saw it move to encompass environmental and climate activists. It also helped the illegal construction blacklisting company the Consulting Association (as documentation from a November 2008 meeting between NETCU and the Consulting Association obtained through an FoI request confirms). Additionally, the Independent Police Complaints Commission says it was likely that every constabulary’s Special Branch will have supplied information about citizens to the construction blacklist.
A third ACPO unit, the National Domestic Extremism Team, was set up in 2005. It was intended to provide an investigatory function, drawing on intelligence gathered through NPOIU spies as well as Forward Intelligence Teams and Evidence Gatherers, for use by forces across the country. All three ACPO units – the NPOIU, NETCU and the NDET – were overseen by the National Co-ordinator Domestic Extremism, or NCDE. Around the same time, direct management of the NPOIU (and presumably the two allied units) passed to ACPO.
Goodbye SDS, hello NDEU
In 2006 the Metropolitan Police’s merged its intelligence-oriented Special Branch (aka SO12) with the investigatory Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) to form Counter Terrorism Command (known as SO15). It was headed by Richard Walton, until he was moved from his post following revelations about his key role in the SDS’ spying on Stephen Lawrence’s family in the Ellison report earlier this year.
With Special Branch, the SDS’ parent unit, now part of Counter Terrorism Command and much of the SDS’s work superseded by the NPOIU, the SDS faded. It has been suggested that when Counter Terrorism Command officers took over the SDS they were alarmed at its targets and methods and moved to close it down. The unit is described as ‘having lost its moral compass’ by the time of its closure in 2008 – as if it ever had one in the first place.
The three ACPO units (the NPOIU, NETCU and the NDET) were merged into the National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) in early 2011. At that time they had a combined budget of around £9m per year.
At the same time as the name change, management of the unit was then passed from the FoI scrutiny-shielded ‘private company’ ACPO to the (not exactly accountable themselves) Metropolitan Police under the ‘lead force’ model. There had been several reviews pushing for this, including Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s report ‘Counter Terrorism Value For Money’.
Certainly, it will have taken a lot of discussion and planning so it seems very unlikely that the exposure of Kennedy in October 2010 played a part. This didn’t stop government ministers trying to portray it as a response a mere week after the Kennedy story hit the media.
The NDEU was brought to operate under the umbrella of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.
As happened when they were three separate units, all the ACPO political police operations under the NDEU were overseen by the National Co-ordinator Domestic Extremism, though the rank for the post was downgraded from Assistant Chief Constable to Chief Superintendent, the first holder of the post being Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Tudway.
Despite the budget for political spy units being public when they were run by ACPO, in 2012 the Met refused to follow suit, and with its gift for exaggerated flourishes it cited text from an Al-Qaeda training manual by way of a reason.
Modern times: mergers and yet another acronym
The unit’s remit changed at the same time as its restructure and it no longer carries out undercover operations. It has taken on the ‘prevention and detection’ tracks previously associated with NETCU and NDET, maintaining a database of activists and working with companies and organisations that activists campaign against. Kennedy-style deployments of undercover officers are now run either by the Special Project Team (SPT) of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, or one of the regional SPTs run by North West, North East and West Midlands Counter Terrorism Units.
Official reports say that this change is, indeed, a result of the exposure of undercover officers as the established anti-terrorism units were felt to have ‘more robust procedures for the deployment of undercover officers’ than their NPOIU/SDS-derived police equivalents.
In April 2011 Tudway sent a private email confirming that the English Defence League were not domestic extremists. Organising racist violence on the streets is fine because it’s understood and safe, whereas fluffy but explicitly anti-capitalist things like Climate Camp get multiple officers like Mark Kennedy and Lynn Watson. This isn’t key to the story, it just illustrates the fact that it’s not threat of political public disorder, damage to property or violence to citizens that concerns the secret police – it’s threats to the present parliamentary political norm and police credibility.
In 2012 the NDEU split its work into two sub-units. The Protest and Disorder Intelligence Unit (PDIU) collates and provides strategic analysis relating to protest and disorder across the UK, whilst the Domestic Extremism Intelligence Unit (DEIU) provides strategic analysis of domestic extremism intelligence within the UK and overseas.
Quite how they define ‘protesters’ as separate from ‘domestic extremists’ isn’t clear. Given their very wide and loose use of ‘domestic extremism’ in the past, it is worrying that they feel the need to spy on even less dangerous campaigners. But it was ever thus. As Merlyn Rees, Home Secretary in the Labour government 1976-79, said, the role of Special Branch is “to collect information on those who I think cause problems for the state”. Although the two subunits are physically separate, they share an intelligence database, the National Special Branch Intelligence System (NSBIS), implying that there is no clear boundary between protesters and domestic extremists.
As if in an attempt to close the book on an embarrassing subject, in May 2013 the NDEU was renamed the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit (NDEDIU).
But there is no reason to believe that the outrages perpetrated by the SDS, NPOIU and associated units have stopped, despite the musical chairs and name changes. When political campaigns are counter-democratically undermined by the state, and participants subjected to sustained psychological and sexual abuse, changing the acronym doesn’t change the immorality and injustice.
Thursday, 05 February 2015 04:54
By Merrick Godhaven
Find this story at 5 February 2015
© Spinwatch
Since 2010 there have been revelations about police infiltration of protest groups. For over 40 years the state sanctioned the use of undercover police to gain intelligence on political activists, including animal rights campaigners.
Though it was widely assumed that groups were under surveillance, no-one would have imagined the extent to which the secret state burrowed deep into organisations, established close friendships and sexual relationships with activists, and broke the law to further its objectives. This article will explain how it happened and what can be learnt from it.
The Special Demonstrations Squad
The story begins in 1968, when tens of thousands of people marched against the Vietnam War. In March there was rioting as protesters fought with police outside the American Embassy in London and the government was so alarmed that it set up of the Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS).
Although the police had used undercover officers before to catch criminals, this was as Rob Evans and Paul Lewis say in their book ‘Undercover’, ‘a new concept in policing.’ Special Branch officers transformed themselves into activists and lived amongst their targets for several years. They changed their appearance and used fake identities to penetrate political groups to the highest levels to gain intelligence and to enable the police to maintain public order. The nickname for the SDS was ‘the hairies’ because – in the early days at least – their operatives had to grow their hair long in order in order to blend into the milieu of radical politics.
The job of the SDS was to infiltrate groups considered subversive which meant those that ‘threatened the safety or well-being of the state or undermined parliamentary democracy’. Initially this meant mainly Marxist or Trotskyist groups, as well as the anti-apartheid movement in the seventies.
The eighties: Robert Lambert
By the early eighties, however, the animal rights movement had become established. It was attracting thousands of people on protest marches against vivisection and groups like the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) were rescuing animals and damaging property. To the state this was a dangerous and subversive threat.
Evans and Lewis say Special Branch first became involved when one of its operatives was deployed at the World Day for Lab Animals march in April 1983. Shortly afterwards a second spy was sent in. His name was Robert Lambert and he became an almost legendary figure amongst his colleagues. For the activists who knew him he was equally unforgettable, though nowadays it is for all the wrong reasons.
Lambert called himself Bob Robinson. Like all SDS agents he stole the identity of a dead child. Mark Robert Robinson died aged seven in 1959, only to be quietly resurrected 24 years later by Lambert who would have found his birth and death certificates. He was then given a forged driving licence, passport and other documents. This procedure was known in SDS circles as the ‘Jackal Run’ because it was based on the book, ‘The Day of the Jackal’.
Lambert quickly immersed himself in the world of animal rights by going to protests and meetings. At a demo outside Hackney Town Hall he met Jackie, 12 years younger than him, and they soon started a relationship and their son was born in 1985. Lambert was already married with two children but knew an activist girlfriend would give his cover an added dimension, making him appear a fully rounded, genuine person.
London Greenpeace and the ALF
In 1984 Lambert became involved in London Greenpeace (LG). This wasn’t an AR group as such but a radical organisation (not to be confused with the much larger Greenpeace International) that embraced anarchism and direct action. Up to then it had been mainly concerned with anti-nuclear and environmental issues but in the mid-eighties it adopted much more of an animal liberation stance.
The first LG meeting I attended was a public meeting with a speaker from the ALF in 1985. Lambert chaired the discussion and obviously had a prominent role in the group. He soon became a close friend. Like all the spies that followed him, Lambert had a van that was used to take people to demos. He said he was a gardener and needed a vehicle for his job.
Lambert’s mission was to infiltrate the ALF and he made it clear he was a strong supporter of illegal actions. In 1986 he organised a benefit gig for the ALF Supporters Group but kept back some of the takings to buy glass etching fluid, used to damage windows. Soon afterwards he confided to friends that he had dressed as a jogger and thrown paint stripper over a car belonging to the director of an animal laboratory.
He also wrote two notable publications. One was a simple A5 leaflet titled ‘You are the ALF!’ which exhorted people to do direct action themselves, not ask others to do so on their behalf. The other was a booklet called ‘London ALF News’ which had articles on the ALF and a diary of actions, including attacks he had carried out.
Debenhams
In July 1987 the ALF targeted three Debenhams’ department stores with incendiary devices because they sold fur. In two, water from the sprinklers caused hundreds of thousands of pounds in losses, but at the Luton branch they had been switched off and fire gutted the store, causing over £6m in damage.
Two months later, Andrew Clarke and Geoff Sheppard were caught at the latter’s bedsit in Tottenham in the act of making incendiary devices as the police burst in. In June 1988 at the Old Bailey Sheppard received 4 years and 4 months and Clarke 3 ½ years. Obviously the police had been tipped off but neither activist knew who it was until nearly 24 years later when Lambert was uncovered as a spy.
Lambert, according to Sheppard, was the third member of this cell. Neither activist suspected him but then they had good reason not to – as far as they were concerned he had planted the device in the Harrow store that caused £340,000 in damage.
The last time I saw Lambert was in a pub near the LG office in Kings Cross in November 1988. He was unusually downbeat as he told me his father who had dementia had just died and the values he fought for in World War II were dying too under Thatcherism. He also said Jackie had started a relationship with a fascist and he was no longer allowed to see his son. Both stories were lies and I now know he was preparing for his exit.
All undercover spies have an exit strategy, usually prepared months if not years in advance. Lamberts would have been devised around the time of the Debenhams action but departing too soon would have appeared suspicious. He waited for over a year, until he left allegedly on the run from Special Branch, which was in fact his employer. They even staged a fake raid at the flat where he was staying.
John Dines
By the beginning of 1989 Bob Robinson was just a memory but LG already had another spy in its ranks. John Dines, using the surname Barker, had joined the group in October 1987. During the next year as he rose to prominence, Lambert was on the wane – going to fewer meetings and demos. This was a pattern that would be repeated time and time again.
Like his mentor, Lambert, Dines had van which he used for demos. He twice drove activists all the way to Yorkshire to sab grouse shoots and he also took them to a protest against Sun Valley Chickens in Herefordshire. While there he was apparently arrested but released without charge. He too produced an anonymous publication called ‘Business as Usual’, which comprised a diary of actions, and he also organised two benefit gigs for London Greenpeace in late 1989.
John Dines and McLibel
While LG was well known in activist circles – mainly for the anti-McDonald’s campaign it had started several years earlier – it hardly registered to the outside world. Most people confused it with Greenpeace International. All that began to change, however, when five of its supporters were sued for libel by McDonald’s in September 1990.
None of the defendants had written the pamphlet that was the subject of the writ; in fact three of them weren’t even part of the group at that time. Ironically Lambert had been one of the architects of the ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’ factsheet but he was long gone.
McDonald’s placed several infiltrators of its own in the group from the autumn of 1989 onwards with the result that it became infested with spies. At some meetings there were more of them than genuine activists. These new corporate spies aroused suspicion – they didn’t quite fit in – and some of them were followed. One of those doing the following was Dines, together with Helen Steel, who would later be sued and become Dines’ girlfriend..
In January 1991 I and two others decided to cut our losses and apologise. Helen and Dave Morris carried on fighting the case as the McLibel 2. By their side was Dines who was the group’s treasurer and a key player. He relayed the legal advice they received and the tactical discussions they had with other group members back to his bosses in the SDS who then passed it on to McDonald’s. Several years later the McLibel trial revealed that Special Branch and McDonald’s had exchanged information about London Greenpeace. Morris and Steel sued the Metropolitan Police over this and received £10,000 in an out of court settlement and an apology.
London Boots Action Group: Andy Davey and Matt Rayner
By the early nineties the animal rights movement was on a roll again and three activists decided to set up a new London-wide organisation called London Boots Action Group (LBAG), to target Boots plc, which at that time did animal testing. LBAG was unashamedly pro-direct action so it is no surprise that it became a target for the SDS. The group was launched in November 1991 with a public meeting that attracted nearly 100 people, two of whom were spies.
Andy Davey and Matt Rayner were two of the many new people to join the fledgling group. But they were slightly different – they had vans, which made them both unusual and useful, and they got quickly involved. Both also had jobs (quite rare in those days as many activists were either unemployed or students). Davey was a ‘man with a van’ removal service – his nickname was ‘Andy Van’ – while Rayner said he worked for a company that delivered musical instruments.
Each lived in a bedsit, Davey in Streatham, south London, Rayner in north London. They even looked similar – tall, dark haired and with glasses, and spoke with Home Counties accents. What set Davey apart from other agents was his dog, named Lucy who came from an animal rescue person that lived locally. His bosses probably decided he would appear a more authentic activist if he had a companion animal.
Personality-wise they differed though. While Rayner was easy going and friendly, enjoying social situations, Davey had a somewhat hesitant and nervous manner and could at times appear too eager to please. Initially there were suspicions about both but they quickly assimilated into the protest scene. They would have known who each other were, as their unit had only about a dozen operatives at any time, but they weren’t close. This meant that if one spy was uncovered, the other wouldn’t fall under suspicion.
It was not common practice for two spies to be placed in the same group. In the book Undercover, the whistleblower Peter Francis says the SDS had two animal rights spies when he joined it in January 1993. This was indicative of the threat posed by animal rights in general and LBAG in particular.
Davey was so well entrenched that he begun to produce the group’s newsletter. Shortly afterwards he also transferred the mailing list onto a computer. We were in the era when some organisations still did not have their own PC or internet access and his IT expertise was considered invaluable. Spies are trained to exploit skills shortages like this, to ensure they become trusted and above suspicion.
Rayner, too, was a fixture in the London scene. He would usually be the one to drive activists to demos outside London. A notable example was the 1993 Grand National when he took a vanload of people to Aintree. This was the year the race had to be abandoned because the course was invaded, costing the betting industry over £60m.
In 1995 – following former spy Dines’ example – he drove a carload of saboteurs to the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ to sab a grouse shoot. While there he was arrested and taken into police custody, only to be released a few hours later. He wasn’t charged but this brush with the law only served to improve his standing.
London Animal Action: Davey’s exit
Rayner had a long term relationship with a female activist. Davey never managed this though it wasn’t for want of trying and he gained a reputation as a lecher. This no doubt undermined his status – some saw him as a bit sad, others didn’t really take to him – and it probably played a part in the decision to take him out of the group. This happened quickly as he announced he was ‘stressed’ and was going to Eastern Europe. The double life he was leading was probably taking its toll as well. He left in February 1995 with a farewell social to which only a few people came. Shortly afterwards a hunt sab whom he knew received a couple of letters postmarked abroad.
As Davey’s exit was hasty, the spy who replaced him joined London Animal Action – as LBAG was now called – around the same time he left. Unusually the new agent was female and her name was Christine Green. As she set about inveigling herself into the group, Rayner’s deployment was reaching its climax. In May 1995 Geoff Sheppard’s flat was raided again by the police where they found materials for making an incendiary device and a sawn-off shotgun. In October he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
After Geoff’s release we speculated on why the police had chosen him. Devices were being placed in various targets and it appeared to have been simply a chance raid due to his arrest in the eighties. However, it is now clear that Rayner set Geoff up just as Lambert had done years earlier. No-one suspected him of the sting because he was, like his boss had been, an established and trusted of the group: by 1995 he was LAA treasurer.
Lambert the spymaster
By the mid-nineties Lambert was the operational manager of the SDS thanks to his ‘legendary tour of duty’ a decade earlier. According to Evans and Lewis he was ‘the gaffer…pulling the strings like a puppet-master’ and he used his experience to guide a new generation of infiltrators who were in some cases spying on the same activists as he had. Geoff was one of those and he describes Rayner as being ‘up to his neck’ in direct action. The final proof came in April 2013 when it was discovered the real Matthew Rayner died aged four in 1972. We still don’t know his true identity.
One of Lambert’s first duties when he re-joined the SDS was to write a report on a spy who had ‘gone rogue’ named Mike Chitty. Chitty – known as Mike Blake – had penetrated the animal rights movement in London at the same time as Lambert but in comparison his deployment had been a failure. It resulted in no high-profile ALF arrests and it seems he enjoyed socialising more than targeting subversives. Even worse, when his deployment finished he returned to his activist comrades, leading a double life unbeknownst to his employers or his wife. He was eventually pensioned off after he began legal action against the Met for the stress he suffered due to his covert role.
Rayner’s exit strategy
Clearly not everybody could cope with the demands of undercover work. Davey may have been one of those but Rayner made of different stuff. His exit strategy was masterly in execution, bearing the hallmark of his mentor and manager, Lambert, who had written a report highlighting the importance of ‘carefully crafted withdrawal plans’ to convince ‘increasingly security-conscious target groups of the authenticity of a manufactured departure…inevitably this entails travel to a foreign country.’
In November1996 Rayner apparently went to work in France for a wine company. He had always liked France and could speak the language fluently. To a few close friends he mentioned his unease with activism after being raided by the police and the breakdown of the relationship with his girlfriend. Very well liked, he was given a big going away party, presented with a camera from the group and a speech wishing him well in his new life.
The next day he drove to France in his van and with him were two activist friends. At the port they were questioned by a police officer who said he was from Special Branch before letting them go on their way. This plan was concocted for the activists’ benefit in the knowledge they would tell others about it, lending further credibility to Rayner’s exit. A few weeks later he briefly came back to London and met up with friends before supposedly returning to France for good. Then over a period of about a year letters were sent and phone messages were left saying he had moved to Argentina, and after that he was never heard from again.
Christine Green
By 1997 Green was occupying a key part of the group, driving activists to demos, going to meetings and mailouts and taking part in protests, as her predecessors had done. She had even taken over Rayner’s role of group treasurer. The same pattern repeating itself but no-one was aware of it. For the next two years Green appears to have been the only spy in LAA. Perhaps there was another who remains unexposed – though this seems unlikely – or the SDS may have deployed another spy elsewhere.
To enhance her cover, Green began a relationship with a well-known hunt saboteur whose job was a coach driver and they took coach loads of protesters to some of the high profile demos of the time, for example at Hillgrove Farm. There is no suggestion that the sab was a spy. There was speculation surrounding her, however: she was not always easy to get along with – though she did make some friends -and she always carried the same bag around with her, which inevitably drew suspicion.
Towards the end of 1999 Green let it be known she was tired with activism. Early in 2000 she said she was departing to Australia for a relative’s funeral and would stay there travelling. About a year later, though, she reappeared and made contact with a few activist friends. Several years later in 2010 she cropped up once more, this time in Cornwall where she was spotted with the same boyfriend in a veggie café. Someone who knew them from LAA tried to have a chat and was all but ignored.
Dave Evans
Green’s replacement in and the last known SDS spy was Dave Evans. Like Dines he appeared to be from New Zealand and he had the same rugged appearance. He had a van and was a gardener too, so very much in the Lambert mould, except his personality couldn’t have been more different. While his boss was amiable, even charming, Evans could be a bit peevish and erratic: once he turned up at a demo then left after only a few minutes saying his flatmate was locked out. Typically spies spent five or six days in the field, only returning to their families for one night per week, but on one occasion he went missing for so long that people became concerned and went round to his flat.
A lot of the time he gave the impression of not being very committed and more interested in the social side of the group. LAA had a big drinking culture which he took to like a duck to water and he often took part in fundraising at festivals by working in bars. In SDS parlance he was a ‘shallow paddler’, not a ‘deep swimmer’.
In the last year or so of his deployment, Evans’ involvement in animal rights tapered off somewhat and it was recently revealed that his flatmate was Jason Bishop, a spy active in anti-capitalist groups. The pair drove minibuses to the G8 protests in Scotland in 2005. Both were arrested with other activists for conspiracy to commit a breach of the peace but the charges were dropped.
Evans’ exit and the end of the SDS
Evans was last seen at the AR Gathering in 2005. While sitting around a bonfire he began asking other activists questions about LAA, which had just folded after its bank account containing thousands of pounds was seized by Huntingdon Life Sciences. The mask slipped and it became obvious that he was a cop. He must have realised this because he left the next morning and was never seen again. Evans was the last known SDS spy in London animal rights circles. There were also at least two corporate infiltrators during this period, one of whom worked her way up to be group treasurer before she was uncovered.
In 2008 the SDS was disbanded, its functions supplanted by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) set up a few years earlier. This was one of three pillars of a new secret state established by the Labour government to combat ‘domestic extremism’, a term which encompassed anyone who wanted to ‘prevent something happening or to change legislation or domestic policy outside of the normal democratic process.’ The others were the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) and the National Domestic Extremism Team.
There is no reason to believe that intelligence gathering has diminished in the last few years. The animal rights movement has been perceived as less of a threat, mainly due to the imprisonment of certain activists, but the emergence of the anti-badger cull campaign will undoubtedly lead to an increase in surveillance and spying. The ‘Undercover’ book also mentions a recent spy in the Welsh animal rights scene but does not go into detail.
Conclusion: (1) How were we duped?
With the benefit of hindsight it appears obvious that animal rights groups in London were targeted by undercover police who followed the same pattern over a period of at least two decades. In that case why did no-one find out what was going on?
The answer lies in Lambert, the spymaster, who established the template the rest followed. For 23 years ‘Bob’ as he was known was held in such high esteem and affection that his authenticity wasn’t doubted. He was one of us, an anarchist and animal liberationist, who had fled overseas to build a new life. Nobody guessed he was working just a few miles away at Scotland Yard.
The agents that followed – Dines, Davey, Rayner, Green and Evans – did attract suspicion but only individually, not as a sequence. The people they spied upon were activists fighting for animal rights and a better world, welcoming of outsiders into their groups, not spycatchers. Moreover the suspicions were usually no more than of the ‘they are a bit dodgy’ variety, with little or no concrete evidence. Many people have been falsely accused in this way over the years.
The whole thing finally fell apart thanks to the determination of two women: Helen Steel and Laura, the girlfriend of a spy called Jim Boyling, whom she met in Reclaim the Streets in 1999. She managed to track him down after he left her and he confessed about Lambert and Dines. Helen had spent years searching for the latter after he supposedly ran off abroad in 1992. By 2010 she knew he had been a cop but it was Laura who confirmed that he was also a spy. At the same time Mark Kennedy, who worked for the NPOIU, was unmasked.
Conclusion: (2) What difference does it make?
The next important question is what difference does it make? Isn’t this just history? While a lot of this happened a long time ago it does stretch up almost to the present. Those who experienced this also have to show what the state is capable of doing to other, newer activists. Should we should trust politicians and believe the promises made by political parties or is the state fundamentally a force for repression? Can we cooperate with a system that tries to disrupt and undermine groups and individuals in this way?
What went on still matters because when we sweep away all the intrigue and scandal, we are left with a very simple fact: the spies were there to prevent animals being saved. This article has concentrated on what occurred in London because that’s where the writer has mainly been active but there is no question that infiltration went on elsewhere. We know, for instance, that there was a spy active inside SHAC before the mass arrests of 2007.
Many people have been arrested, convicted and even imprisoned during the struggle for animal rights and if it can be proved that a spy was involved, then those convictions are possibly unsafe. Even if their role was only driving activists to a demo where they were arrested, then there could be good grounds for an appeal. This is especially true if those nicked discussed their case with the spy, because this information would have been passed on to the police.
So far a total of 56 convictions or attempted prosecutions of environmental protesters have been overturned, abandoned or called into question over the past two years following disclosures surrounding the activities of undercover police officers. Most of these relate to Mark Kennedy and two climate change actions against power stations in 2008 and 2009.
Most defendants are being represented by Mike Schwarz from Bindmans and he has said he is keen to act for animal rights campaigners who want to try to overturn their convictions. But in order to do that we first have to find out who the spies were.
Conclusion: (3) Learning the lessons
There are no fewer than 15 investigations taking police into the role of undercover police. The main one is Operation Herne which is an internal Metropolitan Police enquiry This will last up to three years and cost millions of pounds but many of the victims of the SDS, including women who had relationships with spies, are boycotting it. They have instead called for an independent public enquiry as when the police investigate themselves the result is inevitably a whitewash.
What can activists themselves learn? Well firstly we should not succumb to paranoia. This may sound strange after what we know now but it is important to realise that the spies were in a small minority. Yes there were several in LBAG/LAA over the years but the group was large and regularly attracted over 50 people to its meetings.
There are, however, commonsense precautions that can be taken. The modus operandi of Special Branch agents – such as using dead children’s’ identities and driving vans – will not be replicated by current spies but if there are certain aspects of a person’s behaviour that don’t make sense or appear suspicious , then it is entirely reasonable to find out the truth. If that means questioning the person to ascertain whether they are a bone fide activist, then so be it. A genuine person would not object to this line of enquiry if the reason for it were explained to them.
Finally the lesson to take from all this is that we are making a difference. The state would not have invested such huge resources in trying to undermine the animal rights movement if it did not fear what we stand for. This is something we should be proud of.
If you have any further information or would like to join an email distribution list called ARspycatcher please contact: ARspycatcher@riseup.net
AR Spycatcher
Buro Jansen & Janssen
Recent revelations have exposed the routine embedding of undercover police officers within environmental and social justice campaigns. But piecing together the public evidence on undercover police tactics brings as many questions as answers.
When activists exposed their long-term comrade Mark Stone as police officer Mark Kennedy in 2010, the British public was stunned. On the surface he appeared indistinguishable from his ’targets’. The long-haired, pierced and tattooed man had lived among environmental and social justice groups for seven years. Perhaps most shockingly, he had long-term sexual relationships with activists, including a woman he lived with as a committed partner for six years.
Senior police initially portrayed Mark Kennedy as a rogue officer who had strayed off mission. But a swift flurry of further unmaskings have shown his tactics to be textbook methods, endemic in Britain’s secret police.
Since they were formed amidst the political upheaval of 1968, around 150 officers of the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – later the National Public Order Intelligence Unit, and nowadays the National Domestic Extremism Unit – have infiltrated political groups this way. Behaving in a similar manner to the earlier COINTELPRO operation in the USA, their secret, counter-democratic remit finds them deeply and seriously involved in far left, animal rights, environmental, peace, anti-racist, and far right groups.
The secret police do not gather evidence to be used in court. Instead, they infiltrate groups, collecting information on individual campaigners. The aim is to preemptively disrupt a threat before it begins. Sometimes it is a threat of violence on the streets but much more often it is a threat to corporate profits, to police credibility or to the dominance of capitalist ideology. Being critical of corporations and government policies, being the victim of police corruption, or holding anti-capitalist views, is deemed ‘subversive’ in itself.
Their work has included undermining numerous justice and anti-racism campaigns for people who either died in police custody or whose deaths were under-investigated by police. The undercovers would get actively involved in the campaigns, even holding official positions, looking for personal information with which to discredit the participants – including the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.
In going so deep undercover with so little oversight, officers have sometimes crossed the line to become agent provocateurs, instigating the very activities they are there to prevent.
Textbook methods
Twelve officers have now been exposed. Almost all of them had sexual relations with the citizens they targeted, most of them having serious relationships that integrated them into activists’ lives, work and families. Sexual relationships with targets provided a fast track into the social circle and staved off potential suspicions. One woman explained how she had been used to get social credibility: ‘people trusted me, people knew that I was who I said I was, and people believed, therefore, that he must be who he said he was because he was so welcomed into my family’.
Three of the exposed officers fathered children. This included the man who would go on to be in charge of SDS operations, Bob Lambert, who had a planned pregnancy with one of his activist girlfriends, being present at the birth before disappearing from their lives three years later. The mother of his child only found out the truth by reading a newspaper article 25 years later in June 2012.
The police need a warrant from a judge to search your home once. Yet the secret police decided for themselves to send these men to move in and stay for years, sharing an activist’s innermost feelings and of course the details of their political plans and legal cases. It is the most complete invasion of privacy that it is possible for the state to enact.
The women would think they were meeting The One when it wasn’t even a person – it was a mask, a set of techniques. The whole relationship was controlled, monitored and quite possibly directed by an unseen group of analyst officers. The lasting trauma visited on the women was seen as just collateral damage.
The women were not giving informed consent to the relationships. Had they known the men’s true identities, they would not have allowed them close. One of them has said it feels ‘like being repeatedly raped by the state’. They have been left psychologically devastated, their judgment and trust shattered, unable to form new relationships as they used to.
Identity theft
To create false identities that have official documentation such as passports and driving licenses, a large proportion of officers stole the identity of someone who died as a child. A recent internal police report concedes it was ‘an established practice that new officers were taught’. It is believed that around a hundred secret police officers did it between 1973 and around 2005.
This is not merely in poor taste. Social justice campaigner Helen Steel tried to track down John Barker, a boyfriend who had disappeared. She got the birth certificate and went to the address on it, discovering that ‘John Barker’ was a boy who died of leukemia aged eight. Her boyfriend was police officer John Dines, who had passed off Barker’s identity as his own.
The real John Barker’s brother Anthony spoke of the danger that the police put unwitting bereaved families in: “Imagine that policeman had infiltrated a violent gang or made friends with a volatile person, then disappeared, just like this man did. Someone wanting revenge would have tracked us down to our front door – but they wouldn’t have wanted a cup of tea and a chat, like this woman.”
Miscarriages of justice
Undercover officers have been arrested and prosecuted under their false identities, committing perjury whilst bolstering their undercover identities. In the case of undercover police officer Jim Boyling, prosecution under his false identity granted him access to confidential meetings with lawyers as one of the ‘defendants’.
The judicial process has been undermined in other ways by the presence of undercover police: most shockingly through the withholding of evidence that exonerated accused activists.
In April 2009, Mark Kennedy was part of a group of 114 climate activists preemptively arrested at a meeting for conspiring to shut down a coal-fired power station. Kennedy was the intelligence source for this police action, and had secretly recorded the gathering prior to the police raid. Despite the fact that Kennedy’s surveillance tapes exonerated many of the arrested activists, it was not disclosed to the defence at the subsequent trial, and 20 people were convicted of conspiracy.
A later trial of six others charged with conspiracy occurred following the exposure of Kennedy as a police spy. Prosecutors were forced to disclose the previously withheld evidence – and the case collapsed.
This wasn’t just a police cover-up. Senior members of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) knew of the planned action, and of police plans to preemptively arrest, before it even happened – including the use of an undercover officer. It seems clear that between the arrests and trials senior officials in the CPS worked with police to ensure that Kennedy’s crucial evidence did not come to light.
The original 20 activists had their convictions quashed, with the appeal judges saying that Kennedy had arguably been an agent provocateur and a juror at the original trial lambasting the ‘prolonged entrapment’ of the police operation. 29 convictions from another action that Kennedy was involved in are due to be overturned as well.
These miscarriages of justice were prevented or overturned only because Kennedy was exposed as an undercover police officer. If this one officer can set up at least 55 wrongful convictions, how many thousands can the secret police be responsible for? Even now, police policy to ‘neither confirm nor deny’ whether someone is an undercover police officer, is keeping similar cases in limbo.
Transparently secret
A group of women who were in relationships with undercover officers are suing police – the managers who orchestrated it, not the individual officers – for assault as well as an assortment of crimes of deceit. They are suffering a double injustice. Firstly there was what was done to them, and now – just like with the wrongful convictions – there are the legion legal obstructions, delays and other tricks the police perform in order to avoid accountability and justice.
The human rights claims – infringement of the right to privacy and a family life – are to be heard in a bizarre secret tribunal. They do not get to be in court, to see what evidence the police present (or omit), do not get given the reasons for the judge’s verdict, and have no right to appeal.
So much for the right to a fair trial. The given reason is the protection of security around the secret police. But Mark Kennedy could scarcely be less secret: he hired the notorious press agent Max Clifford and sold his story to tabloid newspapers years ago.
As this scandal rolls on the authorities are forced to respond to the outcry. There have been 17 inquiries commissioned, largely just the police investigating themselves. Others have been given to satellite bodies, such as the Independent Police Complaints Commission or Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, who have an established record of obediently waving through the police’s requirements. Many will not be publishing their findings. All but one have been given very narrow remits that cannot join the dots to create a picture of any systemic problem.
The one inquiry taking a broader view is Operation Herne. It consists of 44 staff, the vast majority of whom are from the same Metropolitan Police force under investigation. They include serving officers who have their future careers to think of before flagging up anything that embarrasses their superiors. It is not due to report for several years and there is no promise to publish the findings. The overseeing officer, Chief Constable Mick Creedon, claims police will do a better job than the independent public inquiry that many people are calling for.
But with secrecy comes impunity. The very fact that the allegations involve secret police covering up the actions of other police who unarguably acted wrongly undermines the credibility of any police self-investigation. Some victims, like the Lawrence family, have much of their grievance based on the consistent failure of police self-investigation.
The smattering of reports out so far show that the truth is not being searched for. Worse than that, there is no redress for victims, nor believable assurances that the same disruption of justice, stifling of protesters and persecution of individuals has ended. The promised tightening up of rules about undercover policing merely requires authorisation from higher ranks and a bit more involvement of the compliant rubber-stamp body of Surveillance Commissioners.
Exporting police spies
After two years among British activists Mark Kennedy was hired out to other states, working in 14 different countries. Whilst under contract to the German police, Kennedy had sexual relationships with activists and, upon arrest for arson, disclosed only his false identity to the public prosecutor, all of which is illegal under German law. Questions abound over the German police’s hiring of this British police spy.
Tenacious research by German parliamentarian Andrej Hunko has revealed that such contracts are not piecemeal: shining light on the hitherto unknown European Co-ordination Group on Undercover Activities that organises and focuses undercover work.
Established in the 1980s, it is comprised of all EU member states and other countries such as the USA, Israel, South Africa and New Zealand, plus selected private companies. It meets irregularly and says it doesn’t keep minutes. According to the German government, the UK and Germany are the trailblazers in the group. Far from the undercover scandal being centred on a rogue officer or a rogue unit, the UK’s tactics seem to be part of a concerted effort in which governments and corporations act together across borders.
The big question
Three years on from Kennedy’s exposure, the flow of facts is not abating. As more activists uncover old spies and former officers come forward out of conscience, it seems that we have still barely begun to get the full story of Britain’s political secret police. It is also becoming clear that Britain is by no means unique in this.
Beyond the ‘who and what’ lies a bigger question – ‘why?’ Where do these monstrously intrusive, anti-democratic, ill-defined, open-ended missions come from? Do the police make them up for themselves? Or are they ordered from higher up? The stoic silence from British politicians seems telling.
We know that these activities, like the individual officers themselves, cross borders. Answers will not come from the UK police investigating themselves. Rather the police forces and governments involved across Europe must be compelled to reveal the truth.
MERRICK BADGER 13 August 2013
Find this story at 13 August 2013
Copyright opendemocracy.net
Eight women have started to sue police chiefs saying they were duped by undercover officers into forming long-term relationships. Below is the statement they have issued. One line has been removed for legal reasons.
Birnberg Peirce and partners have commenced legal action against the Metropolitan Police on behalf of eight women who were deceived into having long term intimate relationships with undercover police officers.
The five undercover officers* were all engaged in infiltrating environmental and social justice campaign groups between the mid 1980’s and 2010 and had relationships with the women lasting from seven months and the longest spanning nine years.
The women assert that the actions of the undercover officers breached their rights as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 3 (no one shall be subject to inhumane and degrading treatment) and Article 8 (respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state).
The women are also bringing claims for deceit, assault, misfeasance in public office and negligence, and seek to highlight and prevent the continuation of psychological, emotional and sexual abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers.
After deceiving at least one woman into having a relationship with him, one of the officers, Bob Lambert, went on to supervise other undercover officers who had long term intimate relationships with campaigners. This, and the extended period in which these relationships were undertaken confirms that recently exposed police spies were not ‘rogue officers’, but were in fact part of an unacceptable pattern of engaging in long term intimate relationships (including embedding themselves in extended families) as part of the infiltration of environmental and other activist groups, which seems to have been condoned at high levels.
Through their collective experiences the women have identified a pattern that covers more than two decades of police operations and is therefore indicative of systemic abuse of female political activists involved in a range of different groups. Officers are given extensive training in how to spin tales, groom, deceive and embed themselves deeply in protest movements. After the women formed loving relationships with these men, they disappeared when their posting ended, leaving the women to cope with the trauma of not knowing whether or not the person they were in love with would return, not knowing if they should be worried or angry and trying to discover what was real and what was not. In one case where the officer re-appeared, his training enabled him to create a new deceit and further abuse the woman who had been left in a state of shock and trauma. The responsibility for the lasting damage this caused goes right back to the undercover operation by the Metropolitan police and the training they gave him in the art of duplicity.
The subsequent discovery that the men they had loved were in fact undercover police officers spying on them and others they knew was a horrifying experience, leaving the women with both a sense of violation and difficulties in trusting others and their own judgement. Discovering that the fundamentals of the relationship were lies has left them trying to comprehend how someone they shared dreams with, knew so intimately and trusted so deeply had never actually existed This abuse has had a severe and lasting emotional impact on those affected.
Quote:
“We believe our case highlights institutionalised sexism within the police. It is incredible that if the police want to search someone’s house they are required to get the permission of a judge, yet if they want to send in an agent who may live and sleep with activists in their homes, this can happen without any apparent oversight!”
“We are bringing this case because we want to see an end to the sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers. It is unacceptable that state agents can cultivate intimate and long lasting relationships with political activists in order to gain so called intelligence on those political movements.”
So far twelve inquiries have been set up in relation to undercover officers, however none of them are focussed on the human rights abuses perpetrated by the unit, none is independent and none of them are open and transparent.
* The five undercover officers are Mark Kennedy, Jim Boyling, Bob Lambert and two others who have not yet been exposed, known when undercover as John Barker and Mark Cassidy.
Rob Evans
Friday 16 December 2011 19.45 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 20 May 2014 21.11 BST
Find this story at 16 December 2011
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited
We are supporting the legal action by eight women deceived into long term intimate relationships with undercover police officers who were infiltrating environmental and social justice campaign groups.
In December 2011 eight women launched legal action against the Metropolitan Police and ACPO for the harm caused by undercover officers deceiving them into long term intimate relationships.
The women assert that the actions of the Metropolitan police officers breached their human rights, subjecting them to inhumane and degrading treatment, and disrespecting their private and family life and their right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.
The women are also bringing claims for deceit, assault, misfeasance in public office and negligence. They seek to highlight and prevent the continuation of psychological, emotional and sexual abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers.
Read more: The Case / Where We Stand
Police Spies Out Of Lives is a support group for the women involved with this case. It is not a legal entity, but a loose affiliation of concerned individuals, friends, and family members of the eight women who are bringing the case.
As part of our support, we are exposing the immoral and unjustified practice of undercover relationships, and the institutional prejudices which have led to the abuse. We are calling for an unequivocal end to the practice, a full inquiry into the past, and changes to prevent it ever happening again.
Some people may have seen this article already, which has been making its rounds on Facebook and the blogosphere, but INCITE! blog editors loved it so much that we wanted to share it here. The piece was originally published in make/shift magazine’s Spring/Summer 2010 issue and written by Courtney Desiree Morris.
In January 2009, activists in Austin, Texas, learned that one of their own, a white activist named Brandon Darby, had infiltrated groups protesting the Republican National Convention (RNC) as an FBI informant. Darby later admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and during the convention. He testified on behalf of the government in the February 2009 trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails, after Darby encouraged them to do so. The two young men, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, each faced up to fifteen years in prison. Crowder accepted a plea bargain to serve three years in a federal prison; under pressure from federal prosecutors, McKay also pled guilty to being in possession of “unregistered Molotov cocktails” and was sentenced to four years in prison. Information gathered by Darby may also have contributed to the case against the RNC 8, activists from around the country charged with “conspiracy to riot and conspiracy to damage property in the furtherance of terrorism.” Austin activists were particularly stunned by the revelation that Darby had served as an informant because he had been a part of various leftist projects and was a leader at Common Ground Relief, a New Orleans–based organization committed to meeting the short-term needs of community members displaced by natural disasters in the Gulf Coast region and dedicated to rebuilding the region and ensuring Katrina evacuees’ right to return.
I was surprised but not shocked by this news. I had learned as an undergrad at the University of Texas that the campus police department routinely placed plainclothes police officers in the meetings of radical student groups—you know, just to keep an eye on them. That was in fall 2001. We saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, watched a cowboy president wage war on terror, and, in the middle of it all, tried to figure out what we could do to challenge the fascist state transformations taking place before our eyes. At the time, however, it seemed silly that there were cops in our meetings—we weren’t the Panthers or the Brown Berets or even some of the rowdier direct-action anti-globalization activists on campus (although we admired them all); we were just young people who didn’t believe war was the best response to the 9/11 attacks. But it wasn’t silly; the FBI does not dismiss political work. Any organization, be it large or small, can provoke the scrutiny of the state. Perhaps your organization poses a large threat, or maybe you’re small now but one day you’ll grow up and be too big to rein in. The state usually opts to kill the movement before it grows.
And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen. Government agencies pick people that no one will notice. Often it’s impossible to prove that they’re informants because they appear to be completely dedicated to social justice. They establish intimate relationships with activists, becoming friends and lovers, often serving in leadership roles in organizations. A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.
Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away. To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements. Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence [1] as a threat to the survival of our struggles. We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).
The Makings of an Informant: Brandon Darby and Common Ground
On Democracy Now! Malik Rahim, former Black Panther and cofounder of Common Ground in New Orleans, spoke about how devastated he was by Darby’s revelation that he was an FBI informant. Several times he stated that his heart had been broken. He especially lamented all of the “young ladies” who left Common Ground as a result of Darby’s domineering, aggressive style of organizing. And when those “young ladies” complained? Well, their concerns likely fell on sympathetic but ultimately unresponsive ears—everything may have been true, and after the fact everyone admits how disruptive Darby was, quick to suggest violent, ill-conceived direct-action schemes that endangered everyone he worked with. There were even claims of Darby sexually assaulting female organizers at Common Ground and in general being dismissive of women working in the organization. [2] Darby created conflict in all of the organizations he worked with, yet people were hesitant to hold him accountable because of his history and reputation as an organizer and his “dedication” to “the work.” People continued to defend him until he outed himself as an FBI informant. Even Rahim, for all of his guilt and angst, chose to leave Darby in charge of Common Ground although every time there was conflict in the organization it seemed to involve Darby.
Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles. I’m not talking about witch hunts; I’m talking about organizing in such a way that we nip a potential Brandon Darby in the bud before he can hurt more people. Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.
A Brief Historical Reflection on Gender Violence in Radical Movements
Reflecting on the radical organizations and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s provides an important historical context for this discussion. Memoirs by women who were actively involved in these struggles reveal the pervasiveness of tolerance (and in some cases advocacy) of gender violence. Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle. In many ways, Elaine Brown’s autobiography, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, has gone the furthest in laying bare the ugly realities of misogyny in the movement and the various ways in which both men and women reproduced and reinforced male privilege and gender violence in these organizations. Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China. Her biography demonstrates more explicitly than either Davis’s or Shakur’s how the masculinist posturing of the BPP (and by extension many radical organizations at the time) created a culture of violence and misogyny that ultimately proved to be the organization’s undoing.
These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as “personal” or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations. However, if we pay attention to the work of Davis, Shakur, Brown, and others, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and create different kinds of political community.
The Racial Politics of Gender Violence
Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities. In “Looking for Common Ground: Relief Work in Post-Katrina New Orleans as an American Parable of Race and Gender Violence,” Rachel Luft explores the disturbing pattern of sexual assault against white female volunteers by white male volunteers doing rebuilding work in the Upper Ninth Ward in 2006. She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men’s assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization’s work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked.
Of course, male privilege is not uniform—white men and men of color are unequal participants in and beneficiaries of patriarchy although they both can and do reproduce gender violence. This disparity in the distribution of patriarchy’s benefits is not lost on women and queer organizers when we attempt to confront men of color who enact gender violence in our communities. We often worry about reproducing particular kinds of racist violence that disproportionately target men of color. We are understandably loath to call the police, involve the state in any way, or place men of color at the mercy of a historically racist criminal (in)justice system; yet our communities (political and otherwise) often do not step up to demand justice on our behalf. We don’t feel comfortable talking to therapists who just reaffirm stereotypes about how fucked-up and exceptionally violent our home communities are. The Left often offers even less support. Our victimization is unfortunate, problematic, but ultimately less important to “the work” than the men of all races who reproduce gender violence in our communities.
Encountering Misogyny on the Left: A Personal Reflection
In the first community group I was actively involved in, I encountered a level of misogyny that I would never have imagined existed in what was supposed to be a radical-people-of-color organization. I was sexually/romantically involved with an older Chicano activist in the group. I was nineteen, an inexperienced young Black activist; he was thirty. He asked me to keep our relationship a secret, and I reluctantly agreed. Later, after he ended the relationship and I was reeling from depression, I discovered that he had been sleeping with at least two other women while we were together. One of them was a friend of mine, another young woman we organized with. Unaware of the nature of our relationship, which he had failed to disclose to her, she slept with him until he disappeared, refusing to answer her calls or explain the abrupt end of their relationship. She and I, after sharing our experiences, began to trade stories with other women who knew and had organized with this man.
We heard of the women who had left a Chicana/o student group and never came back after his lies and secrets blew up while the group was participating in a Zapatista action in Mexico City. The queer, radical, white organizer who left Austin to get away from his abuse. Another white woman, a social worker who thought they might get married only to come to his apartment one evening and find me there. And then there were the ones that came after me. I always wondered if they knew who he really was. The women he dated were amazing, beautiful, kick-ass, radical women that he used as shields to get himself into places he knew would never be open to such a misogynist. I mean, if that cool woman who worked in Chiapas, spoke Spanish, and worked with undocumented immigrants was dating him, he must be down, right? Wrong.
But his misogyny didn’t end there; it was also reflected in his style of organizing. In meetings he always spoke the loudest and longest, using academic jargon that made any discussion excruciatingly more complex than necessary. The academic-speak intimidated people less educated than him because he seemed to know more about radical politics than anyone else. He would talk down to other men in the group, especially those he perceived to be less intelligent than him, which was basically everybody. Then he’d switch gears, apologize for dominating the space, and acknowledge his need to check his male privilege. Ironically, when people did attempt to call him out on his shit, he would feign ignorance—what could they mean, saying that his behavior was masculinist and sexist? He’d complain of being infantilized, refusing to see how he infantilized people all the time. The fact that he was a man of color who could talk a good game about racism and racial-justice struggles masked his abusive behaviors in both radical organizations and his personal relationships. As one of his former partners shared with me, “His radical race analysis allowed people (mostly men but occasionally women as well) to forgive him for being dominating and abusive in his relationships. Womyn had to check their critique of his behavior at the door, lest we lose a man of color in the movement.” One of the reasons it is so difficult to hold men of color accountable for reproducing gender violence is that women of color and white activists continue to be invested in the idea that men of color have it harder than anyone else. How do you hold someone accountable when you believe he is target number one for the state?
Unfortunately he wasn’t the only man like this I encountered in radical spaces—just one of the smarter ones. Reviewing old e-mails, I am shocked at the number of e-mails from men I organized with that were abusive in tone and content, how easily they would talk down to others for minor mistakes. I am more surprised at my meek, diplomatic responses—like an abuse survivor—as I attempted to placate compañeros who saw nothing wrong with yelling at their partners, friends, and other organizers. There were men like this in various organizations I worked with. The one who called his girlfriend a bitch in front of a group of youth of color during a summer encuentro we were hosting. The one who sexually harassed a queer Chicana couple during a trip to México, trying to pressure them into a threesome. The guys who said they would complete a task, didn’t do it, brushed off their compañeras’ demands for accountability, let those women take over the task, and when it was finished took all the credit for someone else’s hard work. The graduate student who hit his partner—and everyone knew he’d done it, but whenever anyone asked, people would just look ashamed and embarrassed and mumble, “It’s complicated.” The ones who constantly demeaned queer folks, even people they organized with. Especially the one who thought it would be a revolutionary act to “kill all these faggots, these niggas on the down low, who are fucking up our children, fucking up our homes, fucking up our world, and fucking up our lives!” The one who would shout you down in a meeting or tell you that you couldn’t be a feminist because you were too pretty. Or the one who thought homosexuality was a disease from Europe.
Yeah, that guy.
Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do. We might think of these misogynists as inadvertent agents of the state. Regardless of whether they are actually informants or not, the work that they do supports the state’s ongoing campaign of terror against social movements and the people who create them. When queer organizers are humiliated and their political struggles sidelined, that is part of an ongoing state project of violence against radicals. When women are knowingly given STIs, physically abused, dismissed in meetings, pushed aside, and forced out of radical organizing spaces while our allies defend known misogynists, organizers collude in the state’s efforts to destroy us.
The state has already understood a fact that the Left has struggled to accept: misogynists make great informants. Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they’ve likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior. They require almost no training and can start the work immediately. What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.
What the FBI gets is that when there are people in activist spaces who are committed to taking power and who understand power as domination, our movements will never realize their potential to remake this world. If our energies are absorbed recuperating from the messes that informants (and people who just act like them) create, we will never be able to focus on the real work of getting free and building the kinds of life-affirming, people-centered communities that we want to live in. To paraphrase bell hooks, where there is a will to dominate there can be no justice, because we will inevitably continue reproducing the same kinds of injustice we claim to be struggling against. It is time for our movements to undergo a radical change from the inside out.
Looking Forward: Creating Gender Justice in our Movements
Radical movements cannot afford the destruction that gender violence creates. If we underestimate the political implications of patriarchal behaviors in our communities, the work will not survive.
Lately I’ve been turning to the work of queers/feminists of color to think through how to challenge these behaviors in our movements. I’ve been reading the autobiographies of women who lived through the chaos of social movements debilitated by machismo. I’m revisiting the work of bell hooks, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Gioconda Belli, Margaret Randall, Elaine Brown, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Anzaldúa to see how other women negotiated gender violence in these spaces and to problematize neat or easy answers about how violence is reproduced in our communities. Newer work by radical feminists of color has also been incredibly helpful, especially the zine Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities, edited by Ching-In Chen, Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
But there are many resources for confronting this dilemma beyond books. The simple act of speaking and sharing our truths is one of the most powerful tools we have. I’ve been speaking to my elders, older women of color in struggle who have experienced the things I’m struggling against, and swapping survival stories with other women. In summer 2008 I began doing workshops on ending misogyny and building collective forms of accountability with Cristina Tzintzún, an Austin-based labor organizer and author of the essay “Killing Misogyny: A Personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival.” We have also begun the even more liberating practice of naming our experiences publicly and calling on our communities to address what we and so many others have experienced.
Dismantling misogyny cannot be work that only women do. We all must do the work because the survival of our movements depends on it. Until we make radical feminist and queer political ethics that directly challenge heteropatriarchal forms of organizing central to our political practice, radical movements will continue to be devastated by the antics of Brandon Darbys (and folks who aren’t informants but just act like them). A queer, radical, feminist ethic of accountability would challenge us to recognize how gender violence is reproduced in our communities, relationships, and organizing practices. Although there are many ways to do this, I want to suggest that there are three key steps that we can take to begin. First, we must support women and queer people in our movements who have experienced interpersonal violence and engage in a collective process of healing. Second, we must initiate a collective dialogue about how we want our communities to look and how to make them safe for everyone. Third, we must develop a model for collective accountability that truly treats the personal as political and helps us to begin practicing justice in our communities. When we allow women/queer organizers to leave activist spaces and protect people whose violence provoked their departure, we are saying we value these de facto state agents who disrupt the work more than we value people whose labor builds and sustains movements.
As angry as gender violence on the Left makes me, I am hopeful. I believe we have the capacity to change and create more justice in our movements. We don’t have to start witch hunts to reveal misogynists and informants. They out themselves every time they refuse to apologize, take ownership of their actions, start conflicts and refuse to work them out through consensus, mistreat their compañer@s. We don’t have to look for them, but when we are presented with their destructive behaviors we have to hold them accountable. Our strategies don’t have to be punitive; people are entitled to their mistakes. But we should expect that people will own those actions and not allow them to become a pattern.
We have a right to be angry when the communities we build that are supposed to be the model for a better, more just world harbor the same kinds of antiqueer, antiwoman, racist violence that pervades society. As radical organizers we must hold each other accountable and not enable misogynists to assert so much power in these spaces. Not allow them to be the faces, voices, and leaders of these movements. Not allow them to rape a compañera and then be on the fucking five o’ clock news. In Brandon Darby’s case, even if no one suspected he was an informant, his domineering and macho behavior should have been all that was needed to call his leadership into question. By not allowing misogyny to take root in our communities and movements, we not only protect ourselves from the efforts of the state to destroy our work but also create stronger movements that cannot be destroyed from within.
[1] I use the term gender violence to refer to the ways in which homophobia and misogyny are rooted in heteronormative understandings of gender identity and gender roles. Heterosexism not only polices non-normative sexualities but also reproduces normative gender roles and identities that reinforce the logic of patriarchy and male privilege.
[2] I learned this from informal conversations with women who had organized with Darby in Austin and New Orleans while participating in the Austin Informants Working Group, which was formed by people who had worked with Darby and were stunned by his revelation that he was an FBI informant.
Article published courtesy of make/shift magazine and Courtney Desiree Morris. For more of the author’s work visit: http://creolemaroon.blogspot.com/.
Find this story at 15 July 2010
Copyright make/shift magazine
Riad Hamad’s body was found in Lady Bird Lake on April 15, 2008. His hands and feet were bound by duct tape, while another strip covered his eyes. Hamad was a school teacher in Austin, Texas, and a peace activist who supported the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund — a charity he raised money for by selling handmade Palestinian crafts. His home was raided by the FBI and the IRS just two months earlier. At first the cause of death was a mystery, but later an autopsy revealed that Hamad had committed suicide.
Several months later, David McKay and Bradley Crowder were arrested for allegedly making Molotov cocktails and plotting to use them to bomb parked police cars. The two young men had driven from Austin to Minneapolis a few days earlier with a cohort of young radicals to protest the 2008 Republican National Convention. They were joined by an estimated 10,000 other demonstrators from around the country, who descended on the city. They anticipated repression, bringing homemade shields to protect themselves from police. What they did not expect, though, was that one of their comrades, a celebrated activist, would twist their minds with macho dreams and pressure them to take dangerous actions — only later to betray them to the FBI.
The new documentary Informant investigates the life of the man behind both of these tragedies: Brandon Darby. It chronicles his rise to prominence as a founder of Common Ground, a collective that spearheaded disaster relief in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and charts his descent into infamy with the revelation that he had been working as an FBI informant.
Although the story is a few years old, two recent cases of FBI entrapment, those of the Cleveland 4 and the NATO 3, have made it imperative for radical communities to understand the ways in which the U.S. government is using informants to wage war on dissent. The film opened in New York City on Friday, Sept. 13, at which time it was also made available to watch online via iTunes.
Informant reconstructs Darby’s history of engagement with social justice groups and builds a kind of pathology of power in an effort to account for his transformation from leftist activist to Tea Party educator. The film juxtaposes the perspectives of journalists and former comrades with Darby’s own narrative, a story that it presents in full for the first time. Early on, the film portrays Darby as an ambitious and talented organizer, recounting how he came to New Orleans after Katrina and persuaded FEMA to rescue his friend, Robert “King” Wilkerson, a former Black Panther.
Many of the film’s commentators, including Scott Crow and Malik Rahim, recall this era fondly. One former friend even calls it “Brandon’s glory days.” But the idea that things were ever peachy keen is undermined by the testimony of Caroline Heldman, a Common Ground alum, whose initial impression was that Darby was as an ego-maniac. Heldman is notably the first woman to appear on screen almost 15 minutes into the film and, unlike the other male characters, she unequivocally denounces his behavior.
To fully appreciate the significance of this fact, we must be clear: This is a story about men, their relationships and their struggles for power. Although Brandon Darby is the film’s antagonist for many audiences and former friends, none of the men involved can ultimately go without blame.
The film depicts a series of complicated and highly problematic relationships between Darby and Scott Crow, Darby and his FBI handler, and Darby and David McKay. These are presented against the backdrop of Darby’s troubled youth and his time spent as a runaway, which creates the psychological vantage point that he was searching for a place to belong. In this scheme, Crow is a major influence on Darby, acting both as a personal and political mentor. But after a period of turmoil in which his political beliefs are sharply called into question, Darby distances himself from Crow and turns to the FBI, where he forms a bond with his fatherly handler.
Darby recounts this process in the film when he describes how he turned Hamad over and reacts to learning of the teacher’s suicide, saying, “It was really upsetting, and the thing that was really, really difficult was that I couldn’t talk about it. The only one I could talk to was the guy from the FBI. And I did every day, because I cried. I was upset.”
A short time later, Darby was assigned by the FBI to monitor a group of activists in Austin who were planning to attend the RNC demonstrations. As an older, more experienced activist, he quickly became an important figure for Bradley Crowder and David McKay, similarly disaffected young men.
“I think Brandon and David are fascinating foils for one another,” Jamie Meltzer, the film’s director, told me. “In a way, when Brandon turned in David, he was turning in his earlier self. If things had gone another way, I think that easily could have been Brandon in his early 20s, if he had been involved with an FBI Informant.”
All of this begs the question: Why didn’t anyone intervene when Darby was showing destructive behavior? The film traces a history of his abuses of power. This perspective doesn’t originate with the filmmaker — it comes from Darby’s former friends. At the same time, the film traces a parallel arc: the systematic failure of these communities to react to obvious signs and hold one of their male leaders accountable. Lisa Fithian, a long-time activist close to the story, appeared in the film and spoke to me at length about the role that patriarchy played in allowing Darby’s behavior to go unchecked.
“Throughout this work, there were women who had a different analysis of Darby’s behavior and urged for different options,” she said. “But we were never really taken seriously.”
The macho culture created by activists in different spheres made it impossible to hold Darby accountable for his actions. It may have even given him impunity.
“Brandon could not have continued to do what he did if he was not backed by Malik and [Common Ground],” said Fithian. “And Brandon could not have continued to do what he did around the RNC if he wasn’t backed by Scott. So you have to see there is a repeating pattern where the dominant systems and the people within them are in many ways unconsciously continuing to promote this.”
Female voices are scattered throughout the film, sprinkled occasionally in the spaces between long-winded male storytellers. It is disturbing that women are given so little space. In one instance of thoughtless editing, Fithian briefly appears on screen to tell us, “Then it got much more complicated when they were on the ground down there,” describing a trip that Darby took to Venezuela. Relegating women to the work of creating transitions in a male-dominated film is counter-productive. Nevertheless, that is the way this story has been approached by all who have tried to tell it. The film’s structure in this sense is dubious, but startlingly accurate in the way it mimicks the flaws of the movement.
“The dominant paradigm was male driven,” said Fithian, adding, “and it’s continuing to be the dominant force in the telling of the story.”
Informant is a film that will undoubtedly leave many in the activist community scratching their heads. What is the utility of a movie about an informant that doesn’t provide answers and, if anything, only creates more questions?
Meltzer suggests this is the wrong way to approach the problem.
“In this type of film, the audience wants to know how the filmmaker feels about the subject so they can know how to feel as the viewer,” he said. “That’s not the kind of experience I want to give to my audience.”
The experience that seems to emerge is found in the gaps that the film creates, either by design or by replicating the world that it is representing. In that sense, Informant offers an instructive lesson. Audiences should question the motives of all parties involved, but especially the masculine perspectives that duel with Brandon Darby.
Let’s take this opportunity to leave the informant himself behind. Instead, we need to focus on the real untold story of the film: the patriarchal silencing of women’s voices that leaves communities vulnerable to infiltration. That wasn’t the story the film intended to tell, but that is the story we need to see.
WED, 9/18/2013 – BY THOMAS HINTZE
Find this story at 18 September 2013
Copyright wagingnonviolence.org
To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.
FOR A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters’ hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was “a leader who’s not looking for a fight, but sure isn’t afraid of one either.”
The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush’s Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they’d come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration’s assault on civil liberties.
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St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin’s big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.
Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an “FBI informant rat loose in Austin.”
The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. “If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus,” wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. “The simple truth,” he wrote on Indymedia.org, “is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Darby’s entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the ’70s, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America’s top domestic terror threat.
FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.
Brandon Darby.: Couresy Loteria Films
Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria Films
But it’s Darby’s snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It’s the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby’s interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)
The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI’s blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) “I feel very morally justified to do the things that I’ve done,” he told me. “I don’t know if I could have handled it much differently.”
Darby “gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” one activist warned me. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”
BRANDON MICHAEL DARBY is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. “He gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”
The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin’s slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park’s 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read “Medicine.” They later “hooked up,” Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.
Some local activists wouldn’t work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana’s Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn’t get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.
It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. “If I’d had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people,” he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he’d since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: “There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents.”
But Common Ground’s approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.
Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. “They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana,” he told “This American Life” reporter Michael May. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think so.'” It turned out armed revolution wasn’t really his thing.
Darby’s former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground’s interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. “He could only see what’s in it for him,” Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.
The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve replicated every system that I fought against,'” he recalls. “It was fucking bizarre.”
By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.
Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. “I talked,” he told me. “And it was the fucking weirdest thing.” He knew his friends would hate him for what he’d done. (The FBI raided Hamad’s home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin’s Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)
MCKAY AND CROWDER FIRST encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin’s Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. “I stated that I wasn’t interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much,” Darby emailed his FBI handlers. “I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down.”
“My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it,” fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby’s FBI email continued: “I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren’t going to be able to fight anybody until they did so.” At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: “Look at me, I’m badass. You can be just like me.” (Darby insists that this never happened.)
“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use” the Molotovs, Crowder told me.
When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group’s trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they’d planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. “It started to feel like Darby hadn’t amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be,” Crowder says. Feeling that Darby’s tough talk should be “in some ways, a guide of behavior,” they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.
“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them,” Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. “I’m just not feeling the vibe on the street,” he texted Darby.
“You butt head,” Darby shot back. “Text me when you can.” He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay’s room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.
The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn’t have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.
AT SOUTH AUSTIN’S STRANGE BREW coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he’s now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. “The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities,” he explains. Climate change is “a bandwagon” and the EPA should be “strongly limited.” Abortion shouldn’t be a federal issue.
He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn’t defending himself against the left’s misrepresentations. “They don’t print what I say,” Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart’s takedown of ACORN, he says, was “completely fucking fair.”)
“No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” Darby says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”
Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. “No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” he says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”
The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. “I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence,” he tells me. “They are complete fucking liars.” As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.
He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it’s hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby’s ex, says he told her of the idea too.) “The guy was trying to put me in prison,” Crow says.
Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: “They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack.” Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. “Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I.”
—By Josh Harkinson | September/October 2011 Issue
Find this story at September/October 2011
Copyright ©2015 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress
How did two boyhood friends from Midland, Texas wind up arrested on terrorism charges at the 2008 Republican National Convention? Better This World follows the journey of David McKay (22) and Bradley Crowder (23) from political neophytes to accused domestic terrorists with a particular focus on the relationship they develop with a radical activist mentor in the six months leading up to their arrests. A dramatic story of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal, Better This World goes to the heart of the War on Terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post-9/11 America.
Tijdens een actiekamp van Occupy Ede in 2012 werd een jongeman aangehouden door de politie omdat hij boetes had openstaan. In de cel kreeg hij bezoek van een RID’er die hem vergeefs gepolst heeft om informant te worden.
De 25-jarige ‘Sjoerd’ sprak met Buro Jansen & Janssen over zijn ervaringen met de politie en een man van een inlichtingendienst die hem lastig vielen in de weken voorafgaande en op de dag van de kroning van Willem-Alexander. De uitwerking daarvan lees je in het artikel ‘Inlichtingendienst intimideert anti-monarchist’, zie elders in deze nieuwsbrief.
Tijdens onze gesprekken met Sjoerd vertelde hij terloops over een benadering door ene Greet. Dat zat zo. Sjoerd deed mee aan Occupy Ede, een kleine groep mensen die in de stad in de Gelderse vallei de wereld wilde verbeteren. Een stad die vooral in het nieuws komt als er iets met Marokkaanse Nederlanders aan de hand is, verders een doorsnee Gelderse gemeente. Occupy Ede haalde zelfs in 2012 de landelijke media.
Na het langdurig kamperen in Occupy-tenten werd Sjoerd in de laatste dagen van het protest aangehouden. Hij had nog twee boetes openstaan en de politie dacht dat Sjoerd zou zijn gevlogen als ze hem niet voor het einde van de actie zouden oppakken. Sjoerd was een bekende van de politie. Hij kraakt al vijf jaar en veel deelnemers aan Occupy waren bekend bij de sterke arm. Uit lopend onderzoek van J&J blijkt dat de politie Occupy scherp in de gaten hield en zicht probeerde te houden op de personen die aan de actie deelnamen.
Greet zonder achternaam
Nadat Sjoerd in de cel was beland, kreeg hij bezoek. Een dame die zich introduceerde als ‘Greet’ zonder achternaam wilde hem het een en ander vragen, het was beslist geen verhoor, zo benadrukte zij. Ze nam Sjoerd mee naar ‘achteren’ en zei dat ze al langer geïnteresseerd was in Occupy, ze wilde graag met hem daarover praten. Sjoerd had Greet nooit eerder gezien. Zij bood hem thee en koffie aan en hij kreeg er ook nog koekjes bij. Sjoerd wilde graag een sigaret roken, dat zou ze proberen te regelen.
Uiteindelijk draaide het gesprek van de RID’er Greet uit op een benadering. “Zij vroeg mij of ik de verklikker wilde uithangen voor de politie”, vertelt Sjoerd. Volgens Greet was Sjoerd bekend met demonstraties in de regio Gelderland vanwege zijn betrokkenheid bij Occupy Ede en kraakacties. Greet wilde heel graag dat Sjoerd zou toehappen. Ze zei dat zij in ruil voor informatie wel kaarten voor feesten voor hem kon regelen, ze had het over een beloning tussen de 50 en de 100 euro.
Greet had het gevoel dat Sjoerd misschien wel rijp was om naar de politie over te lopen. Hij leek zich namelijk af te zetten tegen Occupy die hij een ‘stel doelloze hippies’ noemde. Ook over krakers was hij niet bijster positief. ‘Die zouden zich eens een keer moeten douchen’, vertelde hij aan Greet. Sjoerd bracht het allemaal nogal serieus en niet op een lacherige manier, al bedoelde hij het vooral als practical jokes.
Greet dacht dat Sjoerd de juiste persoon was om politie-informant te worden. Ze kon hem dan wel geen strafvermindering verlenen en aan een sigaret helpen, maar indirect stelde zij hem geld in het vooruitzicht voor het verklikken, aldus Sjoerd. Hij kreeg na afloop van het onderhoud het mobiele nummer van Greet overhandigd en werd enkele dagen later vrijgelaten.
Bij thuiskomt vertelde hij zijn ervaringen aan zijn vriendin Rosa, die enthousiast werd. Ze antwoordde dat zij het wel cool zou vinden om samen met haar vriend af te spreken met een ‘echte spionne’. Sjoerd was minder enthousiast maar ging akkoord met het voorstel. Hij belde Greet en sprak met haar af bij een snackbar op station Ede-Wageningen. Toen Sjoerd met zijn vriendin drie weken na zijn celstraf op de afspraak met Greet verscheen, baalde de functionaris zichtbaar. Ze had erop gerekend om alleen met Sjoerd te kunnen praten.
Black Block
Het gesprek ontwikkelde zich ronduit bizar omdat Rosa niet echt aan het gesprek kon deelnemen. Immers, zij had nooit zelf gekraakt en ook niet deelgenomen aan Occupy. Zij kon echter wel goed boeren en begon een wedstrijd met Sjoerd in wie dat het hardst en het langst kon doen. Greet vond het vervelend dat het stel van de gehele situatie een grap maakte, maar waagde nog wel een poging. Ze begon over het ‘Black Block’ (in het zwart geklede gemaskerde autonomen, red.), of Sjoerd wilde doorgeven bij welke demonstraties het ‘Black Block’ aanwezig zou zijn, dat zou al een heleboel schelen. Ze bleek ook geïnteresseerd in namen en rugnummers van ‘Black Blockers’. Greet wilde daar zeker voor betalen, eventueel in natura in de vorm van een leuke party voor een bedrag tussen de 50 en de 100 euro.
Gaandeweg het gesprek vond Sjoerd het wel welletjes. Vanwege de meligheid en het ongemakkelijke gevoel over het verklikken, zag Sjoerd het helemaal niet meer zitten om met Greet verder te praten. Hij had het gevoel dat hij deelnam aan een gesprek waar hij eigenlijk niet thuishoorde. Greet bleef aanhouden, ze zei dat hij erover kon nadenken en dat hij haar altijd kon bellen als hij van gedachten zou veranderen. Sjoerd wilde zo snel mogelijk weg en maakte haar duidelijk dat hij absoluut niet met de politie wilde samenwerken.
In de weken daarna stuurde Sjoerd haar zo nu en dan een bericht als hij ’s avonds laat thuiskwam. Hij sms’te Greet dan ‘hoi’ en dan antwoordde zij met de vraag ‘zeg het eens?’ Heel diep ontwikkelde de communicatie zich verder niet. Sjoerd sloot het altijd af met ‘doei’ en na verloop van tijd hield hij op met communiceren met de spionne. “Ik heb sindsdien geen last meer gehad van Greet, maar haar nummers zijn 0628630364 en 0651331895, voor wie eens met haar wil communiceren over de politie en de regio Gelderland”, aldus Sjoerd. Achteraf denkt Sjoerd dat hij benaderd werd omdat hij in de cel zat en omdat hij regelmatig was geïnterviewd in kranten en op de lokale tv.
Buro Jansen & Janssen
25 maart 2015